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4-2020

Remembering Who We Are: Liturgical Memory in the Symbolic Remembering Who We Are: Liturgical Memory in the Symbolic

Language of Louis-Marie Chauvet to Combat the Bifurcation of Language of Louis-Marie Chauvet to Combat the Bifurcation of

the Body of Christ the Body of Christ

Keith A. Maczkiewicz

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REMEMBERING WHO WE ARE: LITURGICAL MEMORY IN THE SYMBOLIC

LANGUAGE OF LOUIS-MARIE CHAUVET TO COMBAT THE BIFURCATION

OF THE BODY OF CHRIST

A thesis by

Keith A. Maczkiewicz, S.J.

presented to

The Faculty of the

Jesuit School of Theology

of Santa Clara University

in partial fulfillment for the degree of

Licentiate in Sacred Theology (S.T.L.)

Berkeley, California

April, 2020

Committee Signatures

_________________________________________

Paul Janowiak, S.J., Director Date

_________________________________________

Mary McGann, R.S.C.J., Reader Date

 

Abstract

This thesis addresses the divide that is ever-present in the modern Catholic

Church, and the distance between so-called ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’

Catholics, who, with increasing regularity, prefer not to worship together, rather

retreating to their own partisan camps. In this thesis, questions about personal

and ecclesial identity are raised and the “foundational theology of sacramentality”

of the renowned twentieth-century theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet is brought

into dialogue with the present situation. Chauvet’s fundamental understanding of

the sacraments as something we do as corporeal individuals gathered as the

corporate Body of Christ (and not simply as some ‘things’ we get) has great

implications for inculcating and instituting a common identity among the

worshipping community, an identity that can be forged through the development

of a common ‘language,’ which can take on many corporeal forms.

This thesis picks up Chauvet’s line of thought and suggests that liturgical

memory - anamnesis - is itself a corporeal language that can be spoken by the

gathered assembly, thus working to build up a common identity. A further

argument is made that the way in which the Body of Christ learns to speak this

language, together, can best be seen in the celebration of the Easter Vigil of the

Roman Rite - the liturgy par excellence - where Head and Members gather to ‘hold’

memory, ‘share’ memory, and ‘future’ their memories.

_________________________________________

Paul Janowiak, S.J., Director Date

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Acknowledgements

The completion of this thesis was long overdue, and is owed in part to the

continual prodding of both Philip L. Boroughs, S.J. and Timothy W. O’Brien, S.J.,

who pushed me to finish. John Wronski, S.J. was also a quiet, encouraging force in

his role as Provincial Assistant for Formation for the Northeast and Maryland

Provinces of the Society of Jesus. I am grateful, too, to the Jesuit Community at the

College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA and my colleagues in the Chaplains’

Office there who gave me leave time to complete this thesis in the first and second

years of my priesthood, when I was still figuring out how to do all I was asked to

do.

Thanks is due also to my thesis director, Paul Janowiak, S.J. who has always

encouraged me in my studies and to Mary McGann, R.S.C.J. who I engaged late in

my process as a reader. I am indebted to them.

Finally, I am grateful to the students at the College of the Holy Cross and

the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Oakland, CA who, during the

formative years of regency, theology studies, and the beginning of my priestly

ministry (2013-2020), taught me much about who the Body of Christ is, was, and

could be.

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Table Of Contents

Introduction 2

Chapter 1 - Christ’s Bifurcated Body 7 1.1 The State of the Problem Today 7 1.2 Conservatives vs. Progressives: A Crisis of Authority 14 1.3 The Localization of the Problem: In the Liturgy 18 1.4 Identity and Identity Types 22 1.5 Conservative Identity 25 1.6 Conservative Experiences 28 1.7 Conservative Talking Points 32 1.8 Progressive Identity 35 1.9 The Effects of Fragmented Identities on the Whole 38 1.10 Whence a solution? 39

Chapter 2 - The Thought of Louis-Marie Chauvet 42 2.1 Introduction 42 2.2 Chauvet’s Part I: “From the Metaphysical to the Symbolic” 43 2.3 Chauvet’s Part II: “The Sacraments in the Symbolic Network of 51 the Faith of the Church” 51 2.4 Chauvet’s Part III: “The Symbolizing Act of Christian Identity” 54

Chapter 3 - On the ‘Threshold of the Sacred’ 59 3.1 Liturgy as Both the Cause and the Solution 59 3.2 Spiritual Amnesia 62 3.3 Memory as a Chauvetian Language: Anamnesis 65 3.4 ‘Speaking the Corporeal Language’ of Memory in the Easter 68 Vigil 68

3.4.1 ‘Holding Memory’ in the expansive Liturgy of the Word 69 3.4.2 ‘Sharing Memory’ in the Public Rites of Initiation 72 3.4.3 ‘Futuring Memory’ in the summit of the Eucharistic anaphora 74

Conclusion: The Paschal Candle: Indictment or Celebration? 79

Bibliography 84

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Introduction

At the Easter Vigil service last year at the undergraduate liberal arts college

at which I serve as a chaplain, I had an experience which summed up well the

situation I will attempt to flesh out in the first part of this thesis. Students in the

Rite of Christian Initiation (RCIA) program and their sponsors were gathered

around the baptismal font during the singing of the Litany of the Saints, when the

gathered community - as one - intones the names of those examples from our

shared past who we believe are interceding on our behalf with God. We lift their 1

names in sung prayer, these whose lives have been acknowledged to be of

outstanding holiness. The students who were about to celebrate the Sacrament of

Confirmation, thus completing their initiation into the Church, had, by way of

long-standing tradition, chosen their own names: Augustine, Teresa Benedicta of

the Cross, and Mary, among others. Before the liturgy began, the director of music

had asked for their chosen names, to include them in the litany we would all share

(a pastorally sensitive and appropriately personalized act.)

During the singing, the litany unfolded as it normally does according to the

rubrics, with the traditional names intoned. Soon after, the director of music 2

began to include the saint’s names chosen by the confirmandi , those soon to be

received into the Church. These names were also interspersed with others who

1 Pope St. Paul VI put it well: “We believe in the communion of all the faithful of Christ, those who are pilgrims on earth, the dead who are attaining their purification, and the blessed in heaven, all together forming one Church; and we believe that in this communion the merciful love of God and His saints is ever listening to our prayers, as Jesus told us: ‘Ask and you will receive.’ From Solemni Hac Liturgia (Vatican City: June 30, 1968), #30.  2 Third Edition of the Roman Missal, Personal Edition (Franklin Park, IL: J.S. Paluch Company, 2012), 341-343.  

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have been ‘raised to the altars’, and those whose causes for canonization are also

underway: among them were St. Oscar Romero, the murdered Archbishop of San

Salvador and voice of the poor; Pope St. John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in a

millennia and a worldwide voice for freedom and the search for Truth; and the

Servant of God Pedro Arrupe, the so-called ‘second founder of the Jesuits,’ who as

Superior General of the order in the years following the Second Vatican Council,

called the Society of Jesus to an understanding that faith is empty without working

for the justice that God calls us to.

As I stood next to the altar server holding the Missal for the presider, I

caught sight of the student holding the Paschal candle aloft, that rich symbol

which for Catholics is Christ during this liturgy. The server, an active member of

liturgical ministry and the campus’ modern day version of the sodality, was stone

faced during most of the Litany, but he had a visceral reaction when Pope St. John

XXIII, who convoked Vatican II, was mentioned. He looked towards his friends,

fellow members of the sodality, and rolled his eyes, barely stifling a laugh.

In the midst of this unifying moment at the font, I was keenly aware of the

fact that the Body of Christ is terribly bifurcated, on my campus and in the world

around us. ‘Progressive' and ‘conservative’ Catholics (unhelpful labels as they are)

seem less and less likely or willing to worship together, preferring to retreat to their

own corners, scoffing at the other side and casually throwing around labels to

castigate the beliefs and practices of the other side. To put it in general terms (to

be fleshed out later), conservative Catholics presume that progressive Catholics do

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not care about the deposit of the faith or Tradition, while progressive Catholics

assume that conservative Catholics are modern day Pharisees, more intent on rules

and rubrics than seemingly anything else.

In her work, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian

Orthodoxy (2002), Colleen Carroll sums up well what I myself have noticed in my

own work as a chaplain on a college campus:

[y]oung orthodox Catholics also are launching popular “renegade” fellowship groups at Catholic and secular universities, in a reaction against [what is perceived to be] more liberal campus ministry programs that have failed to clearly articulate the faith or spark student interest. Catholic campuses across the country are seeing revivals of rosary recitations and eucharistic adoration - traditional devotions that some older campus ministers have tried unsuccessfully to discourage. 3

Indeed, the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamic is alive and well on college campuses, not

least of all because “[y]oung adults have a natural tendency to see life in black and

white, with no room for compromise even on minor matters. And conservative

Catholics often are overly alert to the missteps of those they regard as inadequately

orthodox.” Consider the letter I received in my first weeks as the assistant director 4

of liturgy from a group of earnest students who objected to a litany of perceived

abuses: tabernacle placement outside the sanctuary; the vesting practices of

particular presiders; the type of vessels used at Mass; and the absence of bells in

our campus liturgy, to name a few. Loaded and charged words like ‘heresy’ and

‘heretic’ are thrown around casually in these moments and the ‘us and not them’

phenomenon known as homophily can take on an ominous and ugly tone.

3 Colleen Carroll, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodox y (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2002), 277. 4 Ibid., 280.

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At the heart of this divide, which often plays out in the context of the

Church’s liturgy, are really questions about identity: who is a Catholic Christian at

their core? What do they believe? And how do they practice? If the ancient

Christian adage is true - lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi - the law of praying is

the law of believing which is the law of living - then certainly we can look to the

Church’s rich liturgical tradition, perhaps even to its oldest and most vital

traditions, for answers to these questions. In this thesis, I will attempt to use

Louis-Marie Chauvet’s dense sacramental theology to propose a reframing of the

present moment as a way to help us better understand how we might live, pray,

and believe together.

In the following pages, I aim to accomplish several things. In Chapter One,

I hope to present a balanced ‘state of the problem.’ While avoiding caricatures, I

will work to bring some understanding to the bifurcated identities in the Catholic

Church. Some of this chapter will be devoted to sociological studies and

first-person interviews conducted and published in recent years, as well as a

discussion of devotional practices and preferences that seem to be increasingly

connected with these chosen identities. My own experiences in both parish and

college liturgical life will also come into play here.

In Chapter Two, I will take up the rich theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet who

argues that, while holding that the sacraments have, of course, been instituted by

Christ, they also have instituting qualities, that is, in their celebration, they ought

to build up something of a common, unitive identity within the worshipping body.

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This second chapter will serve primarily as a broad primer on Chauvet’s theological

thought, and help lead us into the final section.

In that section, Chapter Three, I hope to apply Chauvet’s thought and bring

it into dialogue with the Church’s celebration of the Easter Vigil. I will argue that

the Easter Vigil, the liturgy par-excellence and the ‘mother of all vigils’,

long-celebrated as the only feast in the Church’s calendar, certainly has something

to teach us about who we are through how we celebrate, which is revealed

primarily through how we engage in the act of remembering seminal salvation

events together. Indeed, it is through the sacraments celebrated in the context of

the Easter Vigil that we best know how Christ intends to institute within us our

common identity, thus breaking down the unhelpful categories and walls which we

have erected between members of the Body.

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Chapter 1 - Christ’s Bifurcated Body

1.1 The State of the Problem Today

The American theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas [b. 1940]

commented that “the problem with Christianity is not that it is socially

conservative or politically liberal, but that ‘it is just too damned dull.’” With all 5

due respect to Professor Hauerwas, I think his comment misses the mark. For

while it seems that many might be able to name the growing separation or

bifurcation in the Church today, there seems to be no common way of describing

it, but rather many theories at play. In this section, I will present a few of these

theories, each of which uses different definitions and stresses, but all of which

point to the situation alive and, sadly, easily seen in the Church today: the

worshipping Body is not unified, but rather fragmented and divided.

Among the most widely read (or watched) today is Catholic media

personality, auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, and founder of the media company,

Word on Fire, Robert Barron (b. 1959). I begin with Bishop Barron’s thesis since he

is an author and personality with a wide reach; indeed, many are introduced to his

viewpoints via his popular videos, online newsletters, and books.

At its core, Barron argues, the Church is remarkably bi-polar, and yet has

been increasingly unwilling to acknowledge this, let alone properly celebrate it. In

his book, Bridging the Great Divide: Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative,

Evangelical Catholic , Barron says, “the chief difficulty we face is a lack of

5 Quoted in Robert Barron, Bridging the Great Divide: Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative, Evangelical Catholic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 256.

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imagination, the inability to hold opposites in tension, the failure to be, boldly and

unapologetically, bi-polar extremists.” In this work, Barron tries to shed the 6

unhelpful labels of conservatives and liberals, political terms that been employed

too often in Church circles, to the detriment of all. Instead, Barron tries to shift

the dialogue back to the Church’s paradoxical roots, seem most clearly in dogmatic

and doctrinal formulas. Barron highlights especially the Christological doctrine

reached during the Council of Chalcedon (451 C.E.), which aimed to settle the

matter brewing between the Arians, Monophysites, and Nestorians.

Each of these groups held a singular understanding of the Incarnation: that

Jesus, sent to earth by the Father was a little divine and a little human (in the case

of the Arians); or was solely divine (as the Monophysites believed); or was solely

human (as the Nestorians preached). Instead, “[w]hat Chalcedon declares is

something altogether strange and unexpected, something that breaks the

categories of philosophy and mythology, something that cannot be caught in the

easy options of left, right, or center: Jesus Christ is fully, emphatically, robustly

human and fully, emphatically, and robustly divine - without mixing, mingling, or

confusion.” Indeed, “[w]hat the orthodox fathers of Chalcedon saw, in short, was 7

the bi-polar extremism of the Christ event: humanity and divinity lying down

together in personal union and utter differentiation.” 8

By pointing to the Christological formula established at Chalcedon, Barron’s

point is well-taken when applied to today’s circumstances: that “the poetry of the

6 Ibid., 3. 7 Ibid., 6-7. 8 Ibid., 7.

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Incarnation is not much in evidence in the weary debates today between liberals,

moderates, and conservatives.” There is no question: experience tells us that 9

extremes are hard to hold together, but Barron’s writings remind us that the

Church has been here before and emerged with a solution we could call ‘creative

tension.’ However, somewhere along the way, Barron insists, the “poetry of the

Incarnation” - the beautiful - was traded in for something substandard: ‘truth’ - the

right. And “[o]ne of the mistakes that both liberals and conservatives make is to

get this process precisely backward, arguing first about right and wrong.” In 10

summary, Barron invokes the prolific 20th century writer and so-called ‘prince of

paradox’ G.K. Chesterton’s wonderful image: the Church (perhaps understood in

this context best as the ‘People of God’ , “has always had a healthy hatred of pink. 11

It hates that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the

philosophers. It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a

dirty gray.” 12

David Gibson, the award-winning religion journalist, and author of The

Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism

(2004) relates how the Jesuit Bernard Lonergan saw this dynamic coming into play

not long after the Vatican II Council (1962-65), predating Barron’s own

observations, when he wrote in 1967 that:

There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left,

9 Ibid., 8. 10 Ibid., 31. 11 Lumen Gentium , A Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Vatican City: November 21, 1964), #9. 12 Barron, Bridging , 6.

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captivated by now this, now that new development, exploring now this and now that new possibility. But what will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half-measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait. 13

Prescient, indeed.

Another Jesuit, Franz Jozef van Beeck (1930-2011), a Dutch author and

Christian theologian, wrote about the Church’s fragmentation in scriptural terms

in the 1980s, in the wake of the Council. Weary of the many ‘causes’ and ideologies

competing for the attention of a Christian, and mindful of how these can often

surface in how we worship together (or keep us from that common table), van

Beeck reminds us that

The Gospels are filled with efforts to “test” Jesus, to force him to take sides in the ideologies, causes, and concerns of the day, or to force him to add yet another cause - his own - to the welter of causes already competing for ascendancy. Jesus, however, always refuses to identify himself with any cause. His “cause” is the Kingdom of God; but that is not a cause in the same order with other causes, let alone in competition with them. Rather, the Kingdom of God places all causes in an eschatological perspective, and so it meets and tests and assays all causes and concerns. The only cause Jesus is totally identified with is the Kingdom of God. 14

van Beeck’s scriptural commentary is a powerful reminder of the long history of

fragmentation in the Church, even from its earliest days. Indeed, the stage was set

from the beginning, the temptation always to seek to divide into camps, rather

than unite in the common Kingdom of which Christ preached. It remains a

13 David Gibson, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 130. 14 Frans Jozef van Beeck, Catholic Identity After Vatican II: Three Types of Faith in the One Church (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985), 58-59.

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current temptation, and we are witnesses even today to a struggle of competing

cultures both within and outside the Church, across time and space.

This temptation has also, through the years, become somewhat

institutionalized. In her recent work on the growing number of so-called ‘personal

parishes’ in the United States Catholic Church (as opposed to the traditional model

of ‘territorial parishes’), Tricia Colleen Bruce helps to flesh out the idea that “birds

of a feather flock together,” that hackneyed phrase that describes people’s innate

desire to join together with others most like themselves. Sociologists, she relates,

“use the term ‘homophily.’” The term itself has no inherent value, good or bad, 15

but rather one can think of homophily as a phenomenon, as a state of being in

which humans in their finiteness often find themselves. Perhaps others could call

this a form of tribalism or familialism. In any case, Bruce is quick to point out that

“[h]omophily marks a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’” and that it “comes with a 16

price.” For while these familial bonds “adhere a group together…[they] also [serve 17

in] fragmenting that group from others. It both isolates and serves.” 18

Widening the scope of her observation, Bruce writes that our Church risks

being “fragmented in such a way that it does not know what other fragments may

be doing, nor how all fit together into a whole. Specialization [vis a vis personal

parishes] means boldly ignoring other aspects of Catholic life (and people).” “The 19

15 Tricia Colleen Bruce, Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 138. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 139. 18 Ibid., 159. 19 Ibid., 161.

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enduring challenge, then, is how and whether fragmentation can reconcile with a

unified...Catholic Church.” The challenge of ‘fragmentation through 20

specialization,’ as Bruce lays it out, is perhaps seen most vividly in how fragmented

groups worship in the Church today, off in their own small corners. This is the

crux of the state of the problem today on my college campus, for example.

Others seem to agree. In her work, Bruce conducts a series of interviews

with interested parties, including several bishops from the United States. One

says,

there has never been a word of encouragement on, “Dear people of God: What we want you to do for the next three years is to go out and divide up the world in the way you like it! And that’s probably going to result in fantastic worship ceremonies, because you’re all going to want to worship the same way and do things the same way!” That’s a long, long cry from the fact that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, and there’s neither male, nor female, nor Jew, nor... etc. No, no. This is an unmet challenge. 21

His concerns are well-taken: for while Catholics may find a parish that ‘meets their

needs’ (in whatever subjective way that phrase may mean) “this does not grant

open permissiveness to pick your own people because worshipping together is

Catholic. Fragmentation is not the goal; the goal is acceptance, inclusion, and

unification.” 22

Bruce is quick to point out however that the issues of fragmentation are

deep-seated, and that the rise of personal parishes “are less the cause of

fragmentation than the institutional sanctioning of it.” Indeed, some in personal 23

20 Ibid., 166. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 168.

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parishes “think of their communities as protecting them from what is perceived as

profane (irreverence, homophobia), while others see the church as empowering

them to pursue a more transformational agenda.” 24

There is no easy fix here, for “erasing personal parishes would do little to

erase the divisions that already characterize chosen parishes or homogeneous

neighborhood clustering. Personal parishes [simply] name it” for good or for ill, 25

and “intentional fragmentation is [employed as] a structural accommodation for

big tent Catholicism.” Indeed, in “using personal parishes to organize local 26

religion, the U.S. Catholic Church engages a parish structure that both empowers

collective identity and perpetuates difference.” The result is that there is 27

somewhat of a “crisis in postconciliar Catholicism...a sense that Catholics have lost,

or are in the process of losing, a shared faith.” 28

For our purposes of understanding the bifurcation, I would like to turn next

to two of these identities - ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ - and unpack them a bit.

Though we can state that the crux of the problem is a divide, a widening chasm

expressed in multiple ways that “strikes at the image of the church’s unity,” it is 29

worth going deeper. Indeed, there seems to be little doubt, in the literature or in

24 Jerome P. Baggett, Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live Their Faith (New York: OUP USA, 2011), Kindle, Location 2609. 25 Bruce, Parish and Place , 168. 26 Ibid., 163. 27 Ibid., 168. 28 R. Scott Appleby, “The Triumph of Americanism: Common Ground for U.S. Catholics in the Twentieth Century” in Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America , eds. Mary Jo Weaver and R. Scott Appleby (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 37. 29 William D. Dinges, “‘We Are What You Were’: Roman Catholic Traditionalism in America” in Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America , eds. Mary Jo Weaver and R. Scott Appleby (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 264.

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the experience of the faithful, that there exists a fragmentation, the expression of

which “may arise as either two stark, opposing poles engaged in ongoing ‘culture

wars’ as sociologist James Davidson Hunter depicted them, or as a multitude of

smaller and distinct subcultures, à la Robert Ezra Park: ‘a mosaic of little worlds

that touch but do not interpenetrate.’” 30

1.2 Conservatives vs. Progressives: A Crisis of Authority

What has already been stated should be re-emphasized here: even though

the “use of words like conservative and progressive to describe individuals and

groups within the post-conciliar church has become relatively common…such

terms are not always helpful. Catholicism to some degree is and must be both

progressive and conservative.” Indeed, if the Church “is to fulfill its mission, it can 31

neither cut itself off from its origins and its past nor close itself to the ever new

present through which alone it can pass into the future. Although individual

Catholics may be more progressive or more conservative, the Church as such needs

to be both.” However, since these terms have come to be used with such 32

frequency, it is essential that we attempt to pin down not necessarily was is meant

by the terms, but the overarching breakdown that keeps these two camps so

separate. The research tends to show that the breakdown can be understood in

how each group appeals to (and longs for) authenticity and authority to establish

unity and holiness, albeit in different ways.

30 Bruce, Parish and Place , 138. 31 Daniel Donovan, Distinctively Catholic: An Exploration of Catholic Identity (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 179. 32 Ibid.

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A general statement may be helpful here, as Scott Appleby puts it in the

edited volume Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America (1995): “‘conservative’

American Catholics tend to be concerned, perhaps more than ‘liberal’ Catholics,

with preserving or defending Roman Catholic orthodoxy (‘right belief ’).” There is 33

a presumed sense that if “the Catholic left is preoccupied with agendas and ‘rights

talk,’ the so-called right is focused on wrongs - the wrongs of the countercultural

sixties and the creeping moral relativism that is invading even the Holy Roman

Church.” ‘We are what you were’, conservative Catholics proudly acclaim, holding 34

that the “challenge of accountability... rests with those who have changed, whose

hold on their Catholic identity is not as firm as conservatives think it should be.” 35

Indeed, this perceived lack of orthodoxy can be seen in the writings of noted papal

biographer and conservative commentator George Weigel (who once labeled the

liberal Catholic establishment “Catholic Lite” ) as well as in “narrative accounts of 36

converts to Catholicism who have taken up the traditionalist cause [and who] often

underscore the need for old-fashioned certitude and the beauties of the old

liturgy.” The Catholic psychologist and writer Eugene Kennedy referred to this as 37

a split between ‘Culture One’ Catholics who

strongly identify with the church as a hierarchical institution to which they look for authoritative teachings, with which they then attempt to comply. [He contrasted this with] ‘Culture Two’ Catholics, who often still consider themselves serious Catholics, [and who] emphasize personal autonomy and

33 Appleby, “Triumph”, 37. 34 Gibson, Coming Catholic Church , 127. 35 Mary Jo Weaver, R. Scott Appleby, eds. “Introduction” in Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 2 . 36 Gibson, Coming Catholic Church , 130. 37 Dinges, “What you Were”, 264.

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accordingly are less willing to obey or even remain attuned to institutional directives. 38

Kennedy saw this is as a gradual supplanting of one culture for another.

van Beeck is also helpful here in helping us to understand the dynamics at

play, though he uses alternative descriptors: the pistic (read: conservative) versus

the charismatic (read: progressive). For van Beeck,

[t]he pistic tends to see unity and holiness in terms of limitation, by means of enforcement of stability and boundaries. The charismatic tends to view them in terms of expansion, by means of commitment to action and openness. Both are man-made, that is to say, useful and even sacramental; but they do not in and of themselves carry the guarantee of the Spirit. 39

This is an essential point: neither of these two extremes is the sole carrier of the

Spirit; i.e., only God is God. This seems like an obvious point, but when God is

equated with the Church (as is too often the case), and when this is then

extrapolated out to various identities and corresponding practices within

individual parishes or other faith communities, the line between God, camp, and

self is easily blurred or obscured.

van Beeck casts his argument in terms of self-abnegation which, precisely

because it is demanding, both camps seem keen to avoid. “The pistic Church tries

to be rich by hoarding, while the charismatic Church seeks wealth by

indiscriminate buying; both are reluctant to embrace poverty of the spirit.” 40

Indeed, there is too much self-interest and attachment to either a static and

38 Baggett, Sense , Kindle Location 1636. 39 van Beeck, Catholic Identity , 66-67. 40 Ibid., 75.

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immovable status quo or to a radical upending of the system that a true

self-emptying proves almost impossible.

There is an underlying fear here of what is to come (which is perhaps the

most scandalous aspect of the fragmentation so prevalent in the Church today:

Christians on both ends of the spectrum seem afraid of a future promised to them.

It is as if there exists no hope.) “The pistic Church tends to be immobilized by the

weight of the past, while the charismatic Church tends to be impressed and

weighed down by the welter of causes, ideologies, and concerns of the present; but

both are afraid of the call of the future”, van Beeck writes. 41

This is a brutal take with real-world consequences. For when consumed by

fear, both camps - pistics/conservatives and charismatics/progressives - “reach,

impatiently, for authoritative answers readily available. They give in to the urge

towards self-maintenance, whether by rigidity or by spinelessness.” These two 42

divergent approaches seek not common ground (which might be new, unfamiliar,

even shaky) but rather familiar and comforting places (which may be filled with rot

or are otherwise unstable.) Both places do not easily lend themselves to encounter

with others or with the stranger, nor do they make for inviting places which others

might seek out. Rather, the “pistic will quote the authoritative answers from the

past, and the charismatic will recite the latest line, but neither will make it a point

to get to know the stranger. But for a traveler looking for a place to stay, there is

little difference between closed doors and no home at all.” “Travelers” are what 43

41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.

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we could also call parishioners. And it is within the parish - and through the

spiritual and devotional preferences that often accompany the ideologies - that

these camps and identities are often on vivid display.

1.3 The Localization of the Problem: In the Liturgy

As I alluded to in the short vignette with which I began this thesis, it is

within the context of the Eucharistic liturgy itself - the gathering of Head and

members in remembrance and sacrifice - that often serves as the flashpoint for

fragmentation. It is an understatement to call this situation lamentable, as the

celebration of the liturgy ought be a place of unity and relationship.

Bishop Barron relates a passage from scripture to help us frame an

understanding that the liturgy is not a place for protest or fragmentation, but a

privileged place for unity. He recalls the first chapter of John’s gospel in which John

the Baptist points out Christ to his disciples: “Behold the Lamb of God!” When

these disciples inquire about where Jesus is staying, he invites them to “come and

see.” We then hear that they “remained with him” for the rest of the day. With 44

this passage in mind, Barron writes that “the liturgy constitutes a privileged

‘staying with’ the Lord Jesus, a participation in the world that he opens up. It is, as

such, the practice that most completely embodies the kind of person that a disciple

ought to be.” Barron is strong here: yes, the liturgy embodies the kind of person 45

that a disciple ought be, but in “their dysfunction, human societies and institutions

rest upon divisions, separations, stratifications, plays of power, political

44 John 1:35-39. 45 Barron, Bridging , 37.

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antagonisms. The Mass lures us onto a different ground.” Or at least it should. 46

Indeed,

[t]o the liturgy are invited people from varying social strata, different economic and educational backgrounds, a variety of races, both genders. This is, of course, an eschatological symbol, an icon of the Kingdom of God, a showing-forth of the Christ in whom ‘there is no slave or free, no Jew or Greek, no male or female’ (Gal. 3:28). 47

Barron’s use of Galatians in discarding labels from the first century stands in stark

contrast to our fragmented society and Church today where labels and insular

identities have come to dominate too much of the landscape, political or

otherwise. The passage from Galatians also serves to remind us that labels and

identities have long been a reality in our world and in the human experience.

In his book Sense of the Faithful , sociologist Jerome Baggett reminds us “that

individual Catholics reappropriate the Catholic tradition together, in parishes, to

resolve the dilemma of authenticity and authority.” In essence, parishes and 48

other similar local faith communities are often on the ‘front lines’ of the large

debates presented above, and thus the small sanctuaries of neighborhood churches

end up being the setting for large disagreements.

These disagreements can often be seen in the different devotional practices

and spiritual preferences that develop in parishes. Among those who place a

premium on “restoring” Catholicism there is a notable increase in more traditional

practices like Eucharistic adoration and rosary recitation (previously cited) and in

46 Ibid., 38. 47 Ibid. 48 Bruce, Parish and Place , 137.

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the rates of participation in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite (unhelpfully

called the Traditional Latin Mass - TLM - in some places). Permission to celebrate

the Extraordinary Form, in which Mass is celebrated primarily in Latin ad orientem

(with the priest’s back to the people) had been rare in the years following the

Council, but access was made more widely available to the global Church after the

publication of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (2007) during the

pontificate of Benedict XVI. Indeed, in the aftermath of Vatican II 49

it was presumed that requests for the use of the 1962 missal would be limited to the older generation which had grown up with it, but in the meantime it has clearly been demonstrated that young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them. 50

For those less interested in “restoring” Catholicism, “the popularization of

new devotional practices suggest[s] the increasing dominance of what scholars

characterized as a ‘spirituality of seekers’ that emphasized experimentation,

privileged a sense of tentativeness, or even skepticism, over certainty, and lent itself

to informal exercises conducted independently by laypeople.” Where one camp 51

seeks certainty in the authority and authenticity of a cleric whispering in a strange

language, the other camp seems to shrug their shoulders at the idea of truth and

makes space for authority and authenticity to be found in other persons and

49 Indeed, the landscape was already primed for “in 1999 a total of 131 of the nation’s [USA] 181 dioceses offered Mass of the pre-Vatican II variety; in 1990 only 6 dioceses offered this.” from James McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful: The Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010), 175. 50 Matthew R. Menendez, “Youth and Liturgy” in Liturgy in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives , ed. Alcuin Reid (New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2016), 161. 51 McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful , 279.

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places. “Each ‘represents morality,’ as [the German-American psychologist

Erik]Erikson would have it, by engendering a sense of collective resistance to a set

of perceived wrongs within both church and society.” The problem is that these 52

two camps are on a path for an eventual collision, which many faith leaders have

seen firsthand in their parishes.

One pastor, interviewed for Tricia Bruce’s book on the rise of personal

parishes, relates the pain he felt when at the end of a parish meeting he heard one

parishioner say to another, “We don't want your church in our Church.” Still 53

other leaders prefer the route of easy bifurcation rather than pursue the hard work

of unity, as another pastor relates:

People are here because they like what we’re doing. If they don’t like it, then for heaven’s sake - go find another parish! I’ve had to tell people that, once in a while: Either go to [a different] Sunday Mass, or go to another parish. We’re not going to change what we are, and what we do, because of personal tastes or likes or dislikes or whatever. We are what we are. 54

You can almost hear the exasperation in this pastor’s response, but his advice to

those who are seeking something - for those travelers in pursuit of encounter and

community - reveals a much deeper issue than simply likes and dislikes,

preferences “or whatever.” There is a much deeper ecclesiological question afoot

here: what is the identity of the Body that Christ leaves us to be?

As we step away from the local level of the parish or faith community, we

can get a little more perspective on what is really at stake in these situations and

the accompanying question I raised above. A diocesan bishop interviewed in

52 Baggett, Sense , Kindle Location 2102. 53 Bruce, Parish and Place, 158. 54 Ibid., 162.

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Bruce’s book puts it starkly and succinctly: “The challenge [of the Church], of

course, is to ensure that integration is happening; that they’re not, they don’t

become this sort of - ‘Those people, those churches’ - but that this is an integral

part of the overall ecclesiology of a local church’s understanding.” This 55

understanding is a complicated proposition and must lead us into a discussion of

identity, a topic to which we must next turn.

1.4 Identity and Identity Types

In general, “the term identity refers to a person’s sense of self, his or her

self-concept.” But this classical definition must necessarily take on new 56

dimensions when we begin adding more descriptors and qualifiers. For instance:

what does a Christian identity entail and how does that influence the identity of

the Body?

The Jesuit theologian T. Howland Sanks notes that Vatican II has several

important legacies arising out of it, with predictable lasting consequences. He

writes that the council's “juxtaposition of diverse ecclesiologies, [and] its internal

incoherence and ambiguity, resulted in a lack of clarity of vision, a lack of certainty,

and a massive identity crisis.” In essence, the People of God - so richly described 57

in the Vatican II documents - no longer know who they are.

The late American sociologist, Dean Hoge (1937-2008), attempted to

formulate a theory of Cathlolic identity in his 2001 work, Young Adult Catholics:

55 Ibid., 164 . 56 William V. D'Antonio, American Catholics Today: New Realities of Their Faith and Their Church (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 15. 57 Baggett, Sense , Kindle Location 350.

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Religion in the Culture of Choice . In this, he identified three specific types of

Catholic identity, which can be instructive for our purposes.

The first Catholic identity might be called “parish Catholics.” These include

those “persons whose Catholic identity is important and central, and it clearly

includes parish life, the sacraments, and institutional authority.” I would include 58

in this group, too, those young people on college campuses like those with whom I

work who are actively engaged with sacramental life and appeal to institutional

authority, even as we are not a parish or part of the diocese, per se.

The second group that Hoge identifies he calls “spiritual Catholics” and

these includes those “persons whose Catholic identity is important and central, but

it does not include taking part in the institutional church.” I put some of my own 59

family members into this identity group. Indeed, my siblings intend on raising

their children as Catholics, with baptism and preparation for the other sacraments

of initiation seemingly as a given. They believe in God and may even pray at times.

But a weekly commitment to a faith community - even one into which their

children are being initiated - is not part of their understanding of their identity or

their practice, even as it was part of their own experience growing up.

Finally, in the third group, Hoge places those he calls “contingent Catholics.”

These are persons “whose Catholic identity is an extension of family or ethnic

identity.” There is a commitment among those in this group to the label of being 60

58 Dean R. Hoge, Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 180. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 181.

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known as a Catholic, but not to a practice of the faith or of a commitment to a faith

community in any real way. You might think here of those families who gather

together to celebrate Easter or Christmas with gifts and a large meal, but for whom

the reality of the Incarnation or Resurrection of our Lord is far from their thoughts

or lips. The holy day of the holiday is thoroughly secularized in their experience,

though they may still give their religion as Catholic, when asked.

These identity types are helpful, to an extent, but it should be noted that

“there exists no one thing called...Catholicism. Rather than being something to

which someone can point, it is actually a confluence of symbols, practices, and

narratives with which people point to their multiform sense of the sacred, which,

in turn, always evades whatever frames are used to depict it.” In essence, 61

“Catholics always appropriate the religious culture available to them in disparate

ways,” hence the establishment and growth of personal parishes closely aligned 62

with identity groups unhelpfully labeled ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive.’ Let us

turn now to a more detailed look about those two main groups, each of which

seems to “possess their own internalized sense of...the rules and regulations that

define a Catholic in good standing…[and] which among these are most central to

the faith.” 63

61 Baggett, Sense , Kindle Location 917. 62 Ibid., Kindle Location 676. 63 Ibid., Kindle Location 1632.

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1.5 Conservative Identity

Identity and labels exist always, of course, on a broad spectrum. On the 64

far right of that spectrum lie the sedevacantists , literally vacant-chair-ists , those

who hold that all of the popes elected since the death of Pope Pius XII in the

mid-twentieth century (1958) have no true claim to the papal see, and thus it has

remained vacant in the years since. The sedevacantists have deep-seated

suspicions of the teachings and reforms of Vatican Council II, which they see as a

break in the long, uninterrupted history of the tradition of the Church. The

Council, these people say, was “the work of apostates and thus null and void.” 65

Clearly those holding sedevacantist views are a minority in the Church today, but

we find a more mainstream group with similar ecclesial views (i.e. suspicions about

a rupture, if not a break) in those people we might find located to their left on the

Catholic-identity spectrum: so-called traditionalists.

Indeed, “the focus of Catholic traditionalism is primarily on internal

ecclesial conflict...do[ing] battle in the sanctuary, not in the street.” While not 66

going to the extremes of the sedevacantists, Catholic traditionalists “seek rather to

clarify religious boundaries, to offset perceived secular trends within the fold, and

to gather together ‘the remnant’ to hold fast to the true faith while launching a

counterrevolution against those who have purportedly subverted it.” What is 67

64 R. Scott Appleby, “What Difference Do They Make?”: Epilogue in Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America , eds. Mary Jo Weaver and R. Scott Appleby (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 238. 65 Ibid., 328. 66 Dinges, “What you Were”, 261. 67 Ibid.

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meant by the ‘true faith’ is, of course a rather nebulous and vexing detail, as is the

membership of the faithful ‘remnant.’ Still, there is a purifying streak at work here,

a strong desire to clean up the ‘mess’ that was wrought by a perceived improper

rollout and implementation of the teachings of Vatican II.

Some traditionalists might also identify as so-called ‘restorationists,’ though the term is neither completely accurate nor fair insofar as it is used to imply that the goal of the restorationists is to bring back into being some form of Catholic theocracy or the alleged ‘good old days’ of a medieval Catholicism or even of the relatively golden era of a ‘1950s’ American Catholicism. 68

Still, without resorting to caricature, the label itself can still be useful in pointing

out that many restorationists have as their goals the “bringing [of] a dynamic

orthodoxy back into the Church and of having it serve as a leaven in the larger

society.” Practical examples of this could include 69

institutionalizing a strong Catholic/Christian presence in the public square and of co-opting and strengthening whatever is useful in modern life to promote Catholic/Christian goals (e.g., scientific or technological advance, cultural and political ideas such as democracy and the separation of Church and State properly understood, rational systems to provide mass education and health care, etc.). 70

The Napa Institute comes to mind as an instantiation of these ideas, a summer

Catholic conference group founded by wealthy American businessman Tim Busch

in 2010. Admittedly a group committed to the work of the New Evangelization and

in assisting Church leadership, the group’s website also promises “a new

renaissance for God and God’s people” and “challenges Catholics to not retreat

68 Joseph A. Varacalli, The Catholic Experience in America (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2006), 50. 69 Ibid. 70 Joseph A. Varacalli, Bright Promise, Failed Community: Catholics and the American Public Order (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001), 105.

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from the public square and...to renew our minds through the message of the

Gospel.” It is worth noting, too, that along with conference speakers presenting 71

on these general themes, “multiple masses of various traditions and rites” as well 72

as devotions like adoration and the rosary are also celebrated during the

conference. Clearly, Catholic identity and the implication for Catholic worship

practice are never far apart.

Catholic restorationists like Tim Busch almost certainly found an ally and a

source of inspiration in Popes John Paul II (1978-2005) and in his successor,

Benedict XVI (2005-2013), and “as an increasingly outspoken segment of the laity

clamored for a return to older spiritual structures, they met with growing support

among Church officials and clerics” , many of whom were installed by those two 73

pontiffs. Buoyed by this series of popes, restorationists continue in their fight for

the soul of the Church, confident in “their belief that the ‘gates of Hell’ shall not

prevail...will[ing] to sacrifice and fight for a cause that is for them holy, if perhaps,

forlorn.” 74

R. Scott Appleby, Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame,

writing in the epilogue of the edited volume Being Right: Conservative Catholics in

America , sums up well the concerns of those on many points of the conservative

end of the Catholic identity spectrum:

The Catholic Church once provided an enclave, buttressed by a coherent

71 “About the Napa Institute”, The Napa Institute, accessed September 12, 2019 http://napa-institute.org/about/#overview . 72 “The Holy Mass”, The Napa Institute, accessed September 12, 2019 http://napa-institute.org/liturgy/ . 73 McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful , 176. 74 Varacalli, Catholic Experience, 53.

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supernatural worldview, that effectively and dramatically resisted the incursions of outsiders who were not orthodox Catholics, but who instead blended their religious faith with political or cultural sensibilities derived from a godless economy or rationalist system of higher education. Some conservative Catholics mourn the loss of that enclave, it seems, because its passing has left them unprotected from the encroachments of the unbeliever. 75

In seeking this protection again, conservative Catholics have often sought refuge in

the liturgy and in particular devotional practices that might somehow recapture a

different time. Let us turn to their experiences now.

1.6 Conservative Experiences

Like identities, Catholic conservative liturgical and devotional practices also

run the gamut. Still, we can speak generally here about some notable trends that

have emerged in recent decades and how identity and practice are mutually

informing one another.

Gibson writes that “there is a small but significant trend towards…

Retro-Catholicism’ - a taste for bits of discarded Catholic culture that young people

find comforting and even a bit cool, like vintage clothing and furniture.” Indeed, 76

some young people that I work with would easily identify with the sentiment

expressed thusly: “this stuff is so outrageous it’s attractive.” But there is more to it 77

than simple attraction. Indeed, the comfort found in these ‘discarded bits’ - older

devotional forms and practices like the wearing of the mantilla , Mass in the

Extraordinary Form (or TLM, as previously discussed) - seem especially attractive

75 Appleby, “What difference?”, 333-334. 76 Gibson, Coming Catholic Church , 80. 77 McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful , 176.

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to young adults “as a comforting port in a storm of uncertainty.” Indeed, “[a]mid 78

the swirl of spiritual, religious, and moral choices that exist in...culture today, many

young adults are opting for the tried-and-true worldview of Christian orthodoxy,” 79

attracted to a worldview that they believe challenges many core values of the

dominant secular culture.

Of course, what is remarkable about this is that of “those most eager for the

return of older devotional forms were many born in the post-Vatican II era, who

had no memory of these rites.” As one young adult interviewed for James’s 80

McCartin’s book Prayers of the Faithful: the Shifting Spiritual Life of Catholics put it:

“Young people are looking for an experience that is somewhat different from the

quotidian reality...For us, this is something that was old and buried and is suddenly

brand new again.” For those who self-identify in this group and with these 81

practices, the quotidian, everyday things are suspect to a degree since these are, in

some ways, seen to have supplanted the “‘moral and religious absolutes’ that they

believed became obscured amid the transformation of the spiritual life in previous

decades.” Instead, the need for real “reverence” and the “yearn[ing] for mystery” 82 83

(nebulous terms in and of themselves) is sought out in devotional practices that 84

work to solidify a Catholic and conservative identity and a “sense of apartness...

78 Gibson, Coming Catholic Church , 80. 79 Carroll, The New Faithful, 15. 80 McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful , 175. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Bruce, Parish and Place , 147. 84 Carroll, The New Faithful, 15.

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[where] uncertainty builds pride, strengthening shared identity.” Those who 85

prefer Mass in the Extraordinary Form/TLM, are a case in point.

“TLM Catholics embrace an alternative Catholic positionality at the

conservative pole of the U.S. Catholic Church,” Tricia Bruce reminds us. The very 86

label of ‘TLM Catholics’ reveals to us that “the Latin Mass appeals to a small

minority of Catholics longing for a ritualized, past-looking, high-stakes variety of

Catholicism only available via the [Extraordinary Form].” Though dramatic, 87

‘high-stakes’ seems not an overstatement, at least if that can be measured in the

words of one TLM Catholic interviewed by Bruce about her TLM community:

Some have come as refugees, as those who have fought a war and are beat up in the battle. And they come here as a safe haven where they don’t have to - you know where they feel like they don’t have to do battle with liturgical abuse, or doctrinal abuse, or whatever. For them, I suppose the reverence would be part of the package, but for them, it’s a place of safety. 88

Other express their devotion to the TLM liturgy in terms of what it does not allow:

Communion in the hand - I’ve always loathed it. I think it’s disgusting! I think it’s horrendous, hideous practice. It fosters - no one will be able to convince me otherwise - it fosters disrespect to the Blessed Sacrament and a lessening of the knowledge, a lessening of the belief, I think, in the true presence. So, there are going to be people that want that. They’re going to want the hideous music, the dreadful happy, clappy music. They’re going to want “Father Bob” up there making nice with them, and jokes, and smiling, and mugging. They’re going to love the impromptu this and that that happens at the Mass. They’re going to love - they love the sign of peace. There are going to be people that loathe to give that up. But there are a lot of people that love to give all that stuff up. 89

85 Bruce, Parish and Place , 144. 86 Ibid., 145. 87 Ibid., 146. 88 Ibid., 147. 89 Ibid., 157.

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In the words of just some of the People of God, the open conflict and ecclesial

separation is easy to see. And for some, the answer has just been to keep like with

like - homophily writ large - even as the communities might be small and

fractured. Indeed, the pastor of a TLM parish stated in an interview that “having

the Latin Mass in its own church kind of avoids all that unnecessary conflict.” 90

Can it be that Christ’s dream that ‘all might be one’ is just too messy?

The messy community is certainly downplayed in many TLM and traditional

parishes. Indeed, the importance of community is almost a non-existent value in

some of these places. In his study, Baggett interviewed parishioners at Saint

Margaret Mary Parish in the Diocese of Oakland, a self-identified ‘conservative’

parish, and proudly so. When asked to define community at the church, one

parishioner offered that

Here it means that people are joined in the same cause, the same ideas, the same thoughts, the same vision of what the future should look like. That’s community here: that people are on the same page with the same goals. What keeps this all together - and keeps us from splintering into all different directions - is the Mass. That’s where we all get the vision I’m talking about. [Interviewer:] How would you describe this vision? Oh, that’s easy. It’s having a sense of reverence. It’s a deep understanding of holiness and a respect for God. 91

Here again we see the appeal to undefinable ‘reverence’ and almost untouchable

mystery, albeit implied. For the parishioners of Margaret Mary some extra

liturgical practices might be O.K., “but [these are] not the Mass; that’s special.” 92

90 Ibid., 162. 91 Baggett, Sense , Kindle Location 2460. 92 Ibid., Kindle Location 2473.

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The Mass, this same parishioner says, must be celebrated correctly , because “once

that host is changed, the body of Christ is there. Well, if Christ is abiding in our

midst, then I think the proper response is “My God!” 93

This quote sums up well the ecclesial divide that becomes expressed in

sacramental and devotional ways: that holiness is localized, and that localization

has seemingly little to do with the community of people gathered around the altar.

Indeed, it is the very community that is the source of suspicion for many

conservative Catholics, including those at Margaret Mary parish.

What they are opposed to is what they see as an alarming disrespect among Catholics for their own tradition. To a degree unparalleled by members of the other parishes, these people are profoundly attached to the sense of mystery and holiness they experience through the symbols, practices, and overall devotionalism associated with the pre-Vatican II church. Unparalleled, too, are their expressions of contempt for those who neglect to accord this the proper respect. 94

Of course, what is meant by ‘tradition’ (or even ‘holiness’) here is up for debate,

and there exist some common conservative talking points about this that would be

helpful to analyze a bit.

1.7 Conservative Talking Points

Many of the most prevalent talking points that can be gleaned from the

research and from interviews with ‘conservative’ members of the Church swirl

around liturgy, of course, and about the reaction to Vatican II. One writer objects

to the “modern” liturgy, claiming that it “does not teach the real presence as

explicitly as is necessary; nay more, it can seem at times visibly to teach the

93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., Kindle Location 2485.

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opposite!” In his airing of grievances, this same writer refers to the TLM as “the 95

better half of the Roman rite”, seeming to dismiss the celebration of the Novus 96

Ordo established after Vatican II. His argument lands in a predictable, if nebulous,

place: “Let us just focus on the thing the Catholic Church is the best at: Tradition!

If we do that, how can we lose?” Of course, his understanding of what is meant 97

by ‘Tradition’ is unclear.

An additional argument issuing from conservative quarters, indeed,

including from the hierarchy itself, is that the celebration of the Novus Ordo has

led to confusion among the People of God about proper roles in the Church. For

some, the Latin Mass “underscored both the ‘fundamentally unequal relationship

between God and man’ and minimized the danger of ‘blurring of the distinction

between clergy and laity, which is all too common today.’” A specific listing of 98

perceived abuses and blurring of lines was published in a publication called The

Apostasy in 1974:

We want the Catholic Mass and the priests of God, not the ‘Meal’ and the updated ‘Presidents.’ We want the organ and the Gregorian Chant, not folk songs and guitars. We want the House of God, not houses where young people fondle each other at the ‘kiss of peace.’ We want adoration and reverence. We believe in the Gospel, not in Godspell; we adore Christ the Lord, not Jesus Superstar. We want our nuns to be true spouses of Christ, humble in appearance, their eyes cast down, and fully covered; not mini-skirted hussies with permed hair, lipstick, shapely calves, and see-through blouses. And we want our priests to wear the Roman collar and

95 Menendez, “Youth”, 164. 96 Ibid., 173. 97 Ibid. 98 McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful , 175.

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the cassock, not a tie with a suit. We want to be able to address them as ‘Father,’ not as ‘Fred’ and ‘Bill.’ 99

The mystery has been lost somehow, some believe, thus why it can said that these -

many of them young - “are rapidly moving toward the third century,” and gladly 100

so.

The worry for many of these conservatives can be expressed thusly: “The

church woke up in 1968 and ached to find itself pluralist.” And the specific 101

grievances of the perceived fallout following the mid-century ecumenical council

are legion:

the decline in traditional popular devotions, the abandonment of distinctive clerical and religious dress, the political activities of clergy and religious, women's abandonment of hats in church, the massive departures from the priesthood and religious life the decline in membership and even the dissolution of Catholic professional associations, the abandonment of Gregorian chant and its replacement by Protestant hymns or by music that imitates popular musical styles, the collapse of the unitary neoscholastic method and language of theology, the spread of dissent (particularly after the publication of Humanae Vitae ), and the movement for the ordination of women. 102

The important point here is that these things listed above - traditional roles and

devotional practices - are not merely religious frills to conservative Catholics. They

are, for many, “what it means to be Catholic. They create a distinctive way of being

religious that, in their absence, would no longer be possible.” If identity is 103

99 Joseph A. Komonchak, “Interpreting the Council Catholic Attitudes toward Vatican II” in Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America , eds. Mary Jo Weaver and R. Scott Appleby (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 27-28. 100 Carroll, The New Faithful , 63. 101 Weaver and Appleby, “Introduction”, 4. 102 Komonchak, “Interpreting”, 18. 103 Baggett, Sense , Kindle Location 2489.

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mutually informed by practice, as it seems to be, then conservatives see a crisis of

epic proportions, that “Catholicism is losing its soul and will, because it has already

lost its mind.” 104

1.8 Progressive Identity

Lest the reader think I am devoting too much ink to the conservative

identity, let us turn to the progressive identity of Catholics. van Beeck’s categories

can again be useful here. You will recall that we have already had some discussion

of the pistic versus the charismatic Christian, van Beeck’s theological terms for

conservatives and progressives. While pistic Christians seem beholden to a frozen

and unyielding sense of ‘tradition’, “believers of the charismatic type tend to take

their cue from present, actual situations.” The charismatic Church seems not 105

afraid of social and moral developments in the culture, but rather takes them up as

new causes, attempting (in some cases) to align these new understandings with

what the Church teaches.

The phenomenon of trans-identity today, and the charismatic/progressive

Church’s reaction is perhaps a good case-in-point. I have recently returned to my

place of employment and, having been away for only three years, I have been

stunned to see the open dialogue about transgender identity on campus, and how

much time and energy is devoted to this in relation to my last stint here. My

colleagues in the chaplaincy have jumped into the deep end of this pool, hosting

gender non-conforming support groups and sponsoring panels and events that

104 Appleby, “Triumph”, 38. 105 van Beeck, Catholic Identity , 56.

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celebrate the trans-identities among us. There has been little dialogue on the

understanding of Catholic anthropology that has been passed down (tradition?),

but much has been made of the gospel call to accompany the anawim , the poor

and marginalized of society.

This is representative of much of the progressive/charismatic identity: like

conservatives, there is a selective cherry-picking of the Church’s teachings and

ways of proceeding, one which attempts “to justify itself by being uncritically and

passively open to whatever comes along.” It is a practice of asking ‘What would 106

Jesus do?’ without also asking ‘what does the Church - which Christ left to us and

many others before us - have to say to the present moment and the current

concern? In other words, ‘where is the rest of the Body on this?’

That dynamic, of bending to the present moment without also appealing to

the past (which are necessarily and always connected, for that is what tradition i s)

could be said to be the result of societal changes. Indeed, “most Catholics born

after 1970 adopted their parents’ relaxed attitude toward the spiritual authority of

ordained leaders, and they distinguished themselves from young Catholics a

century before who were expected to know Church teaching and submit to clerical

judgments.” Instead, there has been a movement towards what David Carlin calls 107

‘generic Christianity.’ Carlin, a politician, professor of sociology, and published

columnist in some popular Catholic media outlets, argues that “generic

Christianity is the dominant religion in the United States today, and Catholics

106 Ibid., 75. Emphasis original. 107 McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful , 178.

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(except for recent immigrants from Latin America) are fully Americanized. If one

is fully American, is it surprising that one would embrace the dominant American

religion?” It is a replication, in a way, of “the previous movement of mainstream 108

Protestant and liberal Judaism toward a much more secularized and less traditional

religion,” one which necessarily has shifted identity and the religious practices 109

that mutually inform one another.

Part of the progressive identity has also been a consistent movement from

religious labeling towards a more diffuse “‘Lone Ranger’ spiritual

individualism...not concerned about a specific denominational identity… [There are

growing numbers, especially of young people, who] see little importance in the

distinctiveness of Catholic institutional identity.” For many, religion “is about 110

doctrine and institutions; [while] ‘spirituality’ is about a higher power and personal

faith. These are [often seen as] ‘two separate things.’ Individuals with these views

are weakly connected to Catholicism's sacramental and symbolic tradition or to its

institutional character. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow contrasts the difference 111

between “a previously dominant ‘dwelling-orientated’ style focused on firm

commitments to churches and traditional beliefs, [with a ‘seeker-oriented

spirituality that] privileges journeying over steadfastness, questioning over

obedience, and a commitment to personal growth at the expense of one's

obligations to the gathered community.” 112

108 Varacalli, Catholic Experience, 246. 109 Ibid., 245. 110 Hoge, Young Adult Catholics , 170. 111 Ibid. 112 Baggett, Sense , Kindle Location 1054.

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1.9 The Effects of Fragmented Identities on the Whole

What I hope is clear by this point in this chapter is that the identities and

the devotional and spiritual practices that often accompany these identities have

become deeply entrenched parts of Catholicism, especially in the West. Separated

communities (sometimes seen in personal parishes) have enabled “Catholics to

choose their world” and the like-minded have been separated through an 113

institutional fragmentation. “This kind of othering distances Catholics from each

other, each side righteous in their stance vis-à-vis the wider...Catholic Church.

In-group solidification begets out-group antagonism” and these stratified 114

communities “present another ‘us’ that’s better than ‘them’ for Catholics to join

and feel at home.” 115

However, it should be noted that this act of choosing and joining up with

like-minded believers “require Catholics to choose what component of their

multifaceted identities and commitments is most salient to their faith lives. Is it

their ethnicity? Their liturgical preference? Their commitment to social justice?” 116

“Given the parameters imposed by the specified mission [and understood identity

of the given community or personal parish], this means privileging certain facets of

one’s identity above others.” In other words, even as the Body of Christ is 117

bifurcated along the conservative/progressive poles as we have seen, the members

113 Bruce, Parish and Place , 159. 114 Ibid., 158. 115 Ibid., 156. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid., 157.

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of the Body of Christ are also working to pull themselves apart within themselves .

It is a disunion on multiple levels.

1.10 Whence a solution?

With all this in mind, it would be easy to throw up one’s hands, declaring a

surrender. It is just too messy and too hard to try to effect any sort of

rapprochement between the poles, some might say, to try to really gather and

worship as a unified Body. Indeed, the fragmentation that has been increasingly

institutionalized (seen in the rise of personal parishes) lends some credence and

authority to this perspective. Still, I am not convinced that the solution to unity is

to choose to highlight only the small slices of our identities that we self-select.

This, rather, seems like a perfect route to increased disunity , and a further

splintering of the One Body of Christ. Indeed, “[a]lthough the foundations for

common ground are sometimes difficult to see, they are discernible to those who

look beyond labels and rhetoric.” So, where does one look? 118

It should perhaps seem obvious that the beginnings of an answer to our

bifurcation ought be found in Christ, for “in these circumstances the Catholic

Church and her members can make no real sense, either of their identity or of

their mission, unless they go back to their abiding foundation: the risen Lord.” 119

Indeed, what is always true regarding individual persons is that “Christian identity

is to be found nowhere apart from the person of Jesus Christ.” This is a 120

118 Julie Hanlon Rubio, Hope for Common Ground: Mediating the Personal and the Political in a Divided Church ( Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press, 2016), xvi. 119 van Beeck, Catholic Identity , 55. 120 Ibid., 60.

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foundational statement, as it aims to supplant identification with any specific

camp or ideology. In this widely encompassing and fundamental truth we can

extrapolate even further: because the Christian’s identity is wholly bound up in the

person of Jesus Christ, the crucified and raised Son of God, it follows that “Church's

real identity lies in the unity which coincides with her holiness. No one [or one

group] owns the Church; Christ ransomed her.” Indeed, it is in the whole of the 121

Paschal Mystery - in the birth, life, death, resurrection of Christ and in missioning

that he hands on to those who will lead his Church - that Christians ought to know

themselves, both as individuals and as a corporate entity. As the Jesuits once

succinctly put it in one of their governing documents on their own identity, “Jesuits

know who they are by looking at him.” This is a phrase that could be universally 122

applied to all Christians.

Furthermore, it is the worship of that same Risen Lord, through the liturgy

of the Church and the celebration of the sacraments which Christ institutes for us,

that we will remember who we are. For the Church

is not simply a congregation of spiritually interested people, but instead, according to Paul’s vivid suggestion, a body of interdependent members, drawing its life from Christ the head. Therefore, when they come together to the altar to partake of Christ, the faithful are, necessarily, drawn together and animated in their identity as a co-inherent company. They realize that they are connected to each other by bonds of love that transcend any social, cultural, or political divisions that might separate them. 123

121 Ibid., 66. 122 Documents of 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (Rome: Jesuit Curia, 2008), Decree 2 #2. 123 Barron, Bridging , 49.

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Indeed, we Catholics are always and everywhere in communio , “bound to each

other through Christ and in God, [bearing] each other’s burdens, acknowledging

that one person’s need is everyone's need.” These bonds of communion are 124

essential to who we know ourselves to be and “it is in the liturgy and in the life that

feeds on the liturgy that the Church receives and celebrates, enacts and

experiences her identity.” Furthermore, a “Church that lives out of worship will 125

be patient and hospitable ad intr a, too. It will, in other words, cultivate active,

appreciative, and even creative tolerance of ambiguity and differences.” How this 126

happens , i.e. how we celebrate the sacraments in a liturgical context, has much

bearing on that outcome, and so I would like to offer the thought of an influential

modern sacramental theologian to help us grasp all that the ‘how’ entails.

124 Ibid., 270. 125 van Beeck, Catholic Identity , 61. 126 Ibid., 76.

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Chapter 2 - The Thought of Louis-Marie Chauvet

2.1 Introduction

In this chapter, I want to turn to the thought of acclaimed 20th century

theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet, whose dense “foundational theology of

sacramentality” I will rely on in chapter three of this thesis. However, in order to 127

deploy his thought properly then, a primer on his argumentation is required for

the casual reader, now. For, “while C[hauvet] is always rigorous in his logic and

clear in his writing, he still demands a great deal of his readers.” My main 128

interest in using Chauvet in proposing a way forward for the Bifurcated Body can

be found in Part III of his seminal work, Symbol and Sacrament , but Part III is

fundamentally built upon the previous two parts and cannot be separated out

without doing damage to the whole. In order to understand Chauvet one must

inhabit the whole arc of his thought.

It is also important to recognize here that Chauvet’s grand project is of a

different order than much of what had passed for liturgical and sacramental

theology in previous centuries and decades. Chauvet’s is not a study of liturgical

rubrics, but “an innovative and foundational study in systematic theology with

wide-ranging concerns, a familiarity with related areas in the human sciences, and

highly original insights.” Chauvet’s work, then, is a continuation of the legacy of 129

influential figures like the Belgian Benedictine Dom Lambert Beauduin (1873-1960)

127 Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 1. 128 Regis A. Duffy, review of Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence , by Louis-Marie Chauvet, Theological Studies 57, no. 3 (Sept 1996): 551. 129 Ibid.

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who, with his colleagues, rediscovered and stressed the “priority of liturgical action

over reflection” on the liturgical texts. Indeed, for too much of its history, “the 130

lex orandi of the church was not grasped as a theological topic.” But in studying 131

liturgical action, the subject of these new studies made an obvious turn towards

the persons who prayed: presiders and their congregations, and the ritual actions of

all gathered for worship which gave rise to a new understanding of corporate

identity through worship together.

2.2 Chauvet’s Part I: “From the Metaphysical to the Symbolic”

Chauvet’s work is distinctive not only for its focus on the people who are

doing the praying, but also because it aims for “a contemporary critique of

metaphysics and an epistemological reorientation that invite[s] dialogue with both

Aquinas and Heidegger.” ‘Contemporary’ is the key word here. Indeed, for a 132

good portion of the Neo-scholastic period of the late 19th century, much of the

thinking and writing about the sacraments was done from the starting point of

Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of “the sacraments as objects that dispense grace.”

The Jesuit sacramental theologian Bruce Morrill rightly notes “that a key 133

characteristic of sacramental theology in the second half of the 20th century has

been the shift...to perceiving them as relational events of encounters between God

and humankind.” Chauvet’s work in Symbol and Sacrament fits squarely into this 134

130 Louis-Marie Chauvet and François Kabasele Lumbala, “Introduction” in Liturgy and the Body , ed. by Louis-Marie Chauvet and François Kabasele Lumbala (London: SCM Press, 1995), viii. 131 Ibid., vii. 132 Duffy, Symbol and Sacrament review, 551. 133 Judith Marie Kubicki, “Recognizing the Presence of Christ in the Liturgical Assembly,” Theological Studies , 65, no. 4 (Dec 2004), 818. 134 Ibid.

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new model. For Chauvet, “the prevailing Neo-Scholastic theology of the

sacraments failed to address the symbolic character of the human world shaped by

language and culture.” These are major themes that he covers in Part I. 135

In chapter one of this work, Chauvet poses the question that he will seek to

answer in the rest of the book: can the sacraments be delivered from the control of

the “instrumental and causal system” of traditional metaphysics onto-theology 136

and come to be understood as symbols, language, and acts that enable the

“unending transformation of subjects into believing subjects”? The short answer 137

is ‘yes’, according to Chauvet. Still, that question needs to be unpacked.

At the core of his objection is an objectivist understanding of the

sacraments that has been held up by too many for too long. This theology, which

focused on “the production of grace in the individual recipient,” where 138

sacraments were seen as ‘dispensers of grace’ or as ‘things you get’, has been held

“at the expense of the concrete existential subjects, who are not taken into

account.” This point seems obvious, and yet worth making: the sacraments were 139

made for people, not the other way around. As soon as you see fit to make that

distinction, fine as it is, you have to acknowledge the complexities that human

beings bring to this new equation. Chief among these complexities are the bodies,

senses and languages that the people pray in and through. (The messiness, as it

135 Joseph C. Mudd, “Edward Schillebeeckx and Louis-Marie Chauvet” in Christian Theologies of the Sacraments: A Comparative Introduction , ed. by Justin Holcomb and David A. Johnson (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 336. 136 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 45. 137 Ibid. 138 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet,” 336. 139 Ibid .

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were, that others would prefer to ignore.) Chauvet seeks to begin here, in these

complexities, for while the “body and the senses were not ignored [in the

objectivist system he rejects]... they were treated more as a condition of the liturgy

and thus more as a methodological point to be gone over by sacramental theology

than as a place which was vital for such theology.” 140

Chauvet then slowly teases out his understanding of signs and symbols but

begins here: by insisting that it is only a human with a body and with senses that

are alive who can interpret the language that signs and symbols present. Talking

about sacraments using only cause-and-effect language (as had long been the case)

is completely unequal to the task at hand since he argues that “causality...is

inevitably involved in a productionist view of reality, [therefore] incompatible with

the understanding that sacraments are signs.” Indeed, cause and effect language 141

are deeply problematic for Chauvet where it concerns the sacraments because

“[t]alking about sacramental signs as causes ignores the complex context of human

becoming in which sacraments participate. The language of cause and effect may

help us to understand the interactions of billiard balls, but can it have anything to

say about the life of grace?” 142

In his dismissal of cause and effect language, then, Chauvet offers

something else, squarely in the tradition, but overlooked and underused, to his

mind: a teaching that is centered on grace and that can be exemplified in the

biblical image of manna as found in Exodus 16. Grace, he says, is “of an entirely

140 Chauvet and Lumbala, Liturgy and the Body , vii. 141 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet,” 342. 142 Ibid., 342-343.

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different order from that of value or empirical verifiability.” As such, it is not a 143

thing you can trade or prove. The reader will recall the story of Exodus 16: as the

Israelites wandered in the wilderness, they grumbled against Moses and Aaron,

whom they blamed for a lack of food and comfort after leading them out of Egypt.

But Yahweh heard their cries and promised flesh and bread, and the people of

Israel found quail in their camps at night and manna sprinkled on the ground in

the morning. The relevant detail here about the biblical manna is its primary

characteristic: it would not last if the Israelites tried to retain it and store it.

Instead, it would only decay. The sacraments are like this, Chauvet contends: they

are not to be ‘gotten’ and stored as if valuable goods, but experienced in real time

in real bodies with real language and in the context of real culture.

However, since this is how grace ‘works’, Chauvet is also quick to point out

that it is also necessary that we recognize that the grace of God is always and

everywhere a mediated event, and that God does not necessarily act in God’s own

person, but rather in and through a world and a language that humans inhabit.

That is, God makes God’s self and God’s gifts known by participating alongside

human beings in the ‘symbolic order’ of human experience. This is true for all

reality, as it were, and it is a “foundational principle of Chauvet’s sacramental

reinterpretation of Christian existence.” 144

Chauvet reminds us that in everything we see and experience, “the

perceived object is always-already a constructed object.” The world that we 145

143 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 45. 144 Kubicki, “Recognizing”, 829. 145 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 85.

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perceive is always a world that already bears our mark. Whatever I see is already

placed within a web of signification and cultural values, the symbolic order of

things into which I am formed and of which I help form. Language is, of course,

part of this symbolic world and yet language only has meaning as it concerns

“humans conscious of their presence in the world as speaking and acting subjects.”

All of human experience, according to Chauvet, is mediated through languages 146

of all different types, which include words as well as images, signs, and symbols.

As such, “[t]o be human is to live in a symbolic order...the convergence of meanings

and values in which human identity is formed and through which human

experience of the world occurs. Our experience of the world and of ourselves is

mediated, and indeed constructed, by that order through language.” In sum, 147

Reality is never present to us except in a mediated way, which is to say, constructed out of the symbolic network of the culture which fashions us. This symbolic order designates the system of connections between the different elements and levels of a culture (economic, social, political, ideological - ethics, philosophy, religion . . .), a system forming a coherent whole that allows the social group and individuals to orient themselves in space, find their place in time, and in general situate themselves in the world in a significant way—in short, to find their identity in a world that makes “sense,” even if, as C. Levi-Strauss [1908-2009, the Belgium-born French anthropologist and ethnologist] says, there always remains an inexpungible residue of signifiers to which we can never give adequate meanings. 148

After laying the foundation for understanding mediation - a reality in which

the reader must continually become grounded lest they become unmoored in

Chauvet’s dense theology - he turns to the concept of symbolic exchange - a process

146 Ibid., 93. 147 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet”, 342. 148 Kubicki, “Recognizing”, 829.

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through which we “consent to the presence of the absence of God.” This, of 149

course, deserves an entire chapter in this thesis, much more space than I can

devote to it here. One of the most important features of this concept is that it

occurs “outside the order of value.” “Unlike market exchange, which functions 150

according to a logic of value and calculation (‘how much for how many?’), symbolic

exchange operates according to a logic of gift wherein having received a gift, one

incurs an obligation to give to some other in turn.” Chauvet sets up “a cycle of 151

gift, reception (obligation), and return gift (other)” which he will apply to a study 152

of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.

It is this very quality that helps us to understand how the relationship with

God and humanity works, i.e. grace. The system of “obligatory generosity” that 153

Chauvet outlines, that something is given ‘for nothing’ is hard to comprehend

when he is talking about human goods, whether that be the sack of grain or the

golden object. Indeed, the capitalistic and utilitarian world that we inhabit leaves

deep traces within us. But it is the multi-level exchange that he reminds us of: any

temporal exchange involves also a symbolic exchange that has implications for

one’s identity, place, and relationship. It is within this understanding that we can

locate the symbolic efficacy of the sacraments: they help us come to ourselves,

before God, and in consenting to symbolic mediation we consent also to “a

conversion, in both our theologizing and our worship, to a God beyond any human

149 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 98. 150 Ibid., 100. 151 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet”, 342. 152 Ibid., 345. 153 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 101.

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conception of ‘God.’” Our consent is a true ‘ noli me tangere’ moment in which 154

we, like Mary Magdalene in the garden , are asked to let go of the God we thought 155

we knew to make space for something new.

Chapter four, “Symbol and Body,” is a fundamental section in Chauvet’s

work. The categories he has been building up to this point now become clear: sign

and symbol, while “always mixed...in the concrete world” are clearly distinct in

their heuristic function. “The symbol does not refer, as does the sign, to 156

something of another order than itself; rather, its function is to introduce us into

an order to which it itself belongs, an order presupposed to be an order of meaning

in its radical otherness.” Symbols, unlike signs, always “point one beyond the 157

immediate experience...Hence the symbol carries with it the transmission of the

whole even while its transmission is always epistemologically incomplete.” 158

Famously, Chauvet uses the example of a single slab of the concrete Berlin Wall 159

to showcase how a symbol works: though these single slabs have been dispersed

throughout the world on college campuses and as memorials in parks, the

individual pieces can never be separated from the whole that they represent: the

Cold War, totalitarianism, the ill effects of violence, etc. Symbols always “represent

the whole..from which it is inseparable...[and] every symbolic element brings with

154 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet”, 343. 155 John 20:17 156 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 111. 157 Ibid., 113. 158 Michael Niebauer, “Chauvet and Anglican Sacramentology,” Journal of Anglican Studies 16, no. 1 (May 2018), 55-56. 159 Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments: the Word of God at the Mercy of the Body (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 2001), 69-73.

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itself the entire socio-cultural system to which it belongs.” Indeed, “the symbol 160

touches what is most real in our world and allows it to come to its truth.” Still, 161

“the fact that sign and symbol, like exchange in the marketplace and symbolic

exchange, belong to two different principles, two different logics, two different

levels does not mean that we could choose one to the exclusion of the other; for

the two hold concretely together.” 162

“For Chauvet, individuals are, by nature of their birth, born into a

preformed linguistic world, and thus inherit a world of symbols with which they

mediate...This symbolic world is inherited and navigated through the body.” 163

Circling back to his rejection of traditional metaphysical onto-theology, he notes

that it is hopelessly “logo-phonocentric,” where words and language are held up at

the expense of the body, even as “the truest things in our faith occur in no other 164

way than through the concreteness of the ‘body.’” Indeed, for Chauvet, 165

“corporality [sic] is the body's very speech” thus enabling him to claim that 166

“[c]orporeality thus denotes the human subject as a signifying body or as a

speaking body; a speaking body because it has always been speaking since its

mother’s womb. That which is most spiritual thus comes only through the

mediation of that which is most corporeal.” 167

160 Chauvet Symbol and Sacrament , 115. 161 Ibid., 117. 162 Ibid., 124. 163 Niebauer, “Anglican Sacramentology,” 55-56. 164 Chauvet Symbol and Sacrament , 144. 165 Ibid., 141. 166 Ibid., 146. 167 Chauvet and Lumbala, Liturgy and the Body , viii.

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What I hope is clear by now is that Chauvet is speaking in the language and

mode of paradox: that “physical mediation is necessary because we necessarily

navigate the symbolic world corporally, yet because it is precisely a mediation, it

can never fully disclose itself.” In effect, those seeking knowledge of “their 168

identity and their place in their social world” by actively wrestling with sign and 169

symbol will certainly find some ‘answers’; those seeking only information , however,

will surely be disappointed.

2.3 Chauvet’s Part II: “The Sacraments in the Symbolic Network of the Faith of the Church”

The next section of Chauvet’s immense tome “profiles Christian identity by

rethinking the connections between Scripture as the level of cognition, sacrament

as that of thanksgiving, and ethics as that of action.” This tripartite structure will 170

be a consistent touchstone for his theology; having expounded upon the

fundamental categories of symbolic exchange, sign, symbol, mediation and

corporeality, Chauvet now turns to applying these in the context of the Christian

community. To do this, a word must be said about what Chauvet means by ‘the

Church.’

Firstly, one must understand that “the Church is not a privileged place in

which one is granted special access to God, but the body of believers who consent

to the presence of the absence of God in order to give God a body in history.” 171

168 Niebauer, “Anglican Sacramentology,” 57. 169 Kubicki, “Recognizing,” 829. 170 Duffy, Symbol and Sacrament review, 551. 171 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet,” 344.

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This is a fundamental for Chauvet, and you will notice that he does not subscribe

to the conservative and liberal labels with which we began this thesis. Instead, he

leans heavily into his understanding of mediation and corporeality and the

unmistakable importance of coming to understand who one is in one’s body and as

a member of the corporate believing Body who gather to celebrate the sacraments,

which are themselves mediations of God. (Again, the astute reader will see how all

of Chauvet’s thought is constantly building on itself.) This coming to understand

oneself as a Christian, then

is to inhabit the Christian symbolic exchange – it is to inhabit a group of words, gestures, actions that mediate Jesus Christ. To inhabit this world is to acknowledge that God has appropriated these symbols to mediate himself, yet it remains a mediation. Christ still remains absent even in the midst of sacramental presence. One cannot abandon these symbols, nor attempt to claim a mastery of their meaning. 172

The Christian, however, is presented with a choice here: whether or not to consent

to the ‘presence of the absence’ of God. If one consents, then one makes space for

Chauvet’s all-encompassing mediation; if one does not, then one settles for an

impoverished understanding of Christ’s sacramental presence in the world, likely

by relying on and falling back into the metaphysics of onto-theology, which

Chauvet spurns, as we have seen.

And it would be easy to fall back. In fact, Chauvet presents three

temptations we must avoid if we are to consent to Christ’s presence in the Church,

without taking leave to try to find him elsewhere: the first is that of “a closed

172 Niebauer, “Anglican Sacramentology,” 56.

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system of religious knowledge” , such as seeking Christ in the Scriptures to the 173

neglect of all else. The second is belief in a sort of ‘sacramental magic’, (easily

imagined in Roman Catholic circles). Finally, there is the sort of moralism (on

both the left and right) by which one might seek to gain a claim over God.

Chauvet observes that each of these temptations arises from the isolation of one of

the constitutive elements of the Christian faith from the others (whether that is

Scripture, ethics, or sacrament) in search of a direct, immediate and ‘full’ presence

of Christ. The only way to arrive at such a place is to consent to mediation, for God

is making God’s self available in ways that can be grasped and known. It is

‘mediation or bust’; there is no other way but in “accepting the institutional

mediation of the Church as a gift of grace.” 174

Having established a model for the structure of Christian identity in chapter

five, in the next three chapters Chauvet proceeds to explore the interrelationships

of the various elements of the tripartite structure he creates. For example, he

examines the manner in which the Scripture grows out of the liturgy of Israel and

the early churches, finds its place within the liturgy, the sacramentality of

Scripture, and the manner in which Scripture “opens up sacramentality from the

inside.” 175

Each of the elements that Chauvet highlights enables the believing

Christian to participate (i.e. to be opened up “from the inside”) in the “process of

symbolic exchange” (which is the title of chapter eight). For instance,

173 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 174. 174 Duffy, Symbol and Sacrament review, 552. 175 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 190.

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The moment of Scripture tells the story of God’s gift of salvation in history culminating in Christ’s self-offering in death of his life to the Father. In the moment of sacrament, human beings gratefully receive the gift of salvation mediated by the memorial of Christ’s passion. In gratitude for the gift they have received, Christians offer a return gift of love for others made concrete in practices of justice and mercy in imitation of Christ. 176

It could be said that the third part of his tripartite structure, ethics, is most likely

to get short shrift, since it is not received in the same way as a sacrament is

celebrated or Scripture is proclaimed and heard. Instead, it is a way of being, a way

of acting and choosing. But Chauvet is clear: “Without the ethical moment of

verification, a sacrament is easily reduced to idolatry - an idolatry of the self.” 177

Instead, the sacraments should be seen as the bridge that connects Scripture and

the ethical response demanded of any Christian, as “the symbolic place of the

on-going transition between Scripture and Ethics, from the letter to the body.” 178

Indeed, “one’s gracious reception of divine love in the sacraments [ought to result]

in a gratuitous sharing of love with others” and “the symbolic order that 179

constitutes sacraments provides Christians with the means by which that

commitment to right relationships is communicated and nurtured.” 180

2.4 Chauvet’s Part III: “The Symbolizing Act of Christian Identity”

176 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet,” 345. 177 Ibid. 178 Duffy, Symbol and Sacrament review, 551. 179 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet,” 348. 180 Judith Marie Kubicki, “Sacramental Symbols in a Time of Violence and Disruption: Shaping People of Hope and Eschatological Vision” in Sacraments: Revelation of the Humanity of God : Engaging the Fundamental Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet , eds. Philippe Bordeyne, Bruce T. Morrill, and Michael S. Driscoll (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 2008), 178.

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We have taken a deep dive into Chauvet’s suspicion and rejection of

traditional metaphysics onto-theology, and seen his dense attempt to replace these

with a broad, holistic and groundbreaking understanding of language, grace, signs,

symbols, mediation, corporeality, and the process of symbolic exchange (and its

interrelated tripartite structure of Scripture, sacrament and ethics). With this

foundation, we now must take a look at how sacraments ‘work’ in the life of the

Church. Though we may seem far afield from where this thesis began, this is the

section of Chauvet’s thinking that gets down to brass tacks, as it were. With a solid

foundation in Chauvet’s work, we can now circle back to our discussion on identity

and how the sacraments effect identities in their celebration, identities which are

both personal and communal, helping believers to discover a “recognition [that]

evokes participation and allows an individual or a group to orient themselves, that

is, to discover their identity and their place in their world.” A major theme of 181

Chauvet’s Part III, then, is an examination of “sacrament as ritual and

embodiment... as a dialectic between the instituted and the instituting dimensions

of sacrament:” that is, what has been left to the Church by Christ (a “scandal” in 182 183

and of itself, according to Chauvet) helps one to know, corporeally and

sacramentally, who he or she is at their core and “what it means to lead a Christian

life.” 184

181 Kubicki, “Recognizing,” 830. 182 Duffy, Symbol and Sacrament review, 551. 183 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 187. 184 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet,” 345.

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First, Chauvet doubles down and reminds his readers that sacraments are

not “something Christians do, [but] rather enactments of who Christians are.” 185

This understanding necessarily implies all of Chauvet’s definitions and

reconceptions, including corporeality. This cannot be overstated, for “[t]he Church

is not defined first by its institutions and its actions, but by the local gathering of

the people of God.” The local assembly, gathered concretely as a ‘body of bodies’ 186

is the living Church, the Body of Christ there present, and the people who

comprise Christ’s Body are the “fulfillment of its existence.” 187

Chauvet proposes a ‘law of symbolic rupture’ to capture the dynamic that

occurs whenever the Body gathers, defining it as “an event in which one is taken

out of the ordinaries of life and into ‘the threshold of the sacred.’ This rupture

creates ‘an empty space with regard to the immediate and utilitarian.’” It is ritual 188

- words, actions, languages of many types and forms - “which help create this

symbolic rupture.” In Chauvet’s estimation, symbolic rupture, achieved through 189

ritual, “is necessary because it forces us to encounter God without being able to

master God.” Indeed, 190

Chauvet’s view of the symbolic rupture creates a separate axis that can serve as a foundation… It presents a way of viewing ritual that rejects a useful/useless categorization – the purpose (if such a word could even be applied) of ritual is not how useful it is in either recapturing a perceived golden age of sacramental worship, or in perfectly encapsulating the idiosyncrasies of the cultural zeitgeist, but in its ability to create space

185 Ibid., 346. 186 Niebauer, “Anglican Sacramentology,” 52. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid., 62. 189 Ibid. 190 Ibid., 63.

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within cultural cacophony to enable God to be known in his difference, as wholly Other. 191

We can see here in this selection a direct correlation and refutation of the binaries

that we saw presented earlier in chapter one of this thesis: Bishop Barron’s

understanding of the divide as those arguing fundamentally from a place of ‘right’

and wrong’; Bernard Lonergan’s prescient view that there would be a ‘solid right’

and a ‘scattered left’; and van Beeck’s ‘pistics’ and ‘charismatics.’

So too do we see how Chauvet’s dense theology offers an answer to this

polarization and bifurcation: through ritual. Since ritual is wholly other - and

must be necessarily mediated through language, signs and symbols - it is the only

way to enable the people, the Body of Christ, in their individual and corporate

bodies, to encounter the God who is wholly Other, without controlling or

mastering God, thus coming to know themselves individually and corporately (i.e.

their identity) as they stand before that same God.

That last part is what Chauvet means by the ‘instituting quality’ of the

sacrament: that liturgical action celebrating the sacraments finds its “dominant

value...situated in the order of signification. Because that is the case, recognition

rather than cognition is the primary dynamic. The purpose of symbolic activity...is

not to provide information but integration that results from recognition.” In 192

other words, ritual action helps people to see who they are and how they become

one in their worshipping together, even as their recognition must necessarily

191 Ibid., 64. 192 Kubicki, “Recognizing,” 831.

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happen as a body of gathered individuals. The celebration of the sacraments

teaches us something, yes, but not necessarily didactically, concerning doctrine or

dogma; rather, it teaches us about ourselves and how “to find [our] identity as

members of the community and followers of Christ.” Christ’s dream that ‘all 193

might be one’ therefore can be found in himself, and in the celebration of his

paschal mystery, “the entire drama of salvation.” Let us turn then to the 194

preeminent celebration of Christ’s Pasch, the Easter Vigil of the Roman Rite, and

see what it holds for us in light of Chauvet’s work.

193 Ibid., 835. 194 Mudd, “Schillebeeckx and Chauvet,” 343.

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Chapter 3 - On the ‘Threshold of the Sacred’

3.1 Liturgy as Both the Cause and the Solution

Identity politics in the Church are too often, as has been shown, fought out

in the open in so-called ‘liturgy wars,’ and so it would be easy for one to assume

that liturgy is the very problem that needs to be solved and perhaps even excised.

But liturgy, as Chauvet reveals to us, is fundamental to our meaning-making and

identity-making capabilities, and so this is not a viable way forward for the

believer. Instead, the solution must be found by wading through our liturgical

rituals (i.e. the privileged ways we have of mediating our communion with God),

the very thing that seems to be tearing the Body of Christ apart.

Still, we should remember that Chauvet’s insistent claim is that the

fundamental flaw in most sacramental thinking “is the belief that the sacraments

are a medium through which one moves from lesser to greater certainty, a

movement towards further and further intellectual purification of concepts.” No 195

- instead, he reminds us that our liturgical celebrations are “not a matter of ‘ideas’

but of ‘bodies’ or, better, of corporeality,” and that the focus of our worship must 196

be on someone , not something. This someone, of course, is the Trinity - three

persons: Father, Son and Spirit - and the relationship they have with us, which is

necessarily mediated through our liturgical worship.

van Beeck is helpful here. He writes

The person of Jesus Christ alive in the Spirit is the source of Christian identity- experience as well as the Christian experience of openness to the

195 Niebauer, “Anglican Sacramentology,” 58. 196 Chauvet and Lumbala, Liturgy and the Body , viii.

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world. This means that neither the profoundest traditional Christian liturgy, doctrine, or discipline nor the most urgent Christian cause can replace the living Christ who is “yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” as the Easter liturgy has it. 197

His claim is simple: it is Christ who ought to rule our hearts and our identities, not

any particular case or cause, and not any particular vantage point. van Beeck uses

the example of Jesus’ centrality in the gospels, “most obvious in the Resurrection

appearances where it is unmistakably the person Jesus Christ, alive and present in

the Spirit, who is revealed by the Father as the first-fruits of the new world - he and

nobody else.” No thing and no one else has the role and the effect that Christ, 198

risen from the dead, had.

Or has. Since Christ has ascended to the Father and sent the Spirit to those

first apostles, we are still being taught by the Divine Teacher who we are and whose

we are as members of his Body, and “[t]he liturgy is the powerful pedagogy where

we learn to consent to the presence of the absence of God, who obliges us to give

him a body in the world.” In our liturgy, as we have seen, “symbols mediate 199

reality by negotiating connections…[and] the connections allow subjects both as

members of a social group and as individuals to make sense of their world and to

find their identity by discovering relationships.” This connective-oneness is what 200

the Church means by ‘communion’ and, as Chauvet and Lumbala state,

“Communion with the living God as shown in Jesus Christ, the liturgy reminds us,

197 van Beeck, Catholic Identity , 57. (emphasis original) 198 Ibid., 59. 199 Duffy, Symbol and Sacrament review, 551. 200 Kubicki, “Recognizing,” 829.

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does not take place other than in the opacity of a body of history, of culture, of the

world and of desire.” That is, the liturgy can never be separated out from the 201

messiness of human life and experience, the discussion of which began this paper.

Circumstances and cultural forces must be reckoned with and wrestled, of course,

but never for their own ends. Rather, the wrestling must be at the service of

keeping the community’s eyes on our Trinitarian God, always. How often we forget

this!

In his groundbreaking encyclical, Mediator Dei (1947), the first of its kind

focused exclusively on the liturgy, Pope Pius XII wrote that

Along with the Church, therefore, her Divine Founder is present at every liturgical function... The sacred liturgy is, consequently, the public worship which our Redeemer as Head of the Church renders to the Father, as well as the worship which the community of the faithful renders to its Founder, and through Him to the heavenly Father. It is, in short, the worship rendered by the Mystical Body of Christ in the entirety of its Head and members. 202

Pius XII knew well that communion was at the heart of the Church’s liturgy: Christ

as Head gathering the members of his Body, in worship of the Father in the unity

of the Holy Spirit. What ought be clear is that communion in the liturgy cannot be

separated out in the ways in which too many try to do that today, i.e. conservatives

vs. progressives, us vs. them, etc. Indeed, as soon as there is a separation, true

communion, as the Trinity is modeling for us, is lost. “The Church, therefore, must

treasure the liturgy and keep it deeply alive, as the summit to which all ‘the

Church’s activity is directed’ and “the fountain from which all her power flows.’

201 Chauvet and Lumbala, Liturgy and the Body , ix. 202 Mediator Dei (Vatican City, November 20, 1947), #20.

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Keeping the liturgy alive means, of course, keeping the Spirit of the liturgy alive -

[for] there lies the guarantee of the Church's identity.” 203

My worry is that we have forgotten. 3.2 Spiritual Amnesia

In the Church’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum

Concilium, promulgated in 1963 as the first of the documents produced at the

Second Vatican Council, the Council Fathers wrote solemnly of the Church’s very

nature and, thus, its important ritual work accomplished throughout the Liturgical

Year:

Holy Mother Church is conscious that she must celebrate the saving work of her divine Spouse by devoutly recalling it on certain days throughout the course of the year. Every week, on the day which she has called the Lord's day, she keeps the memory of the Lord's resurrection, which she also celebrates once in the year, together with His blessed passion, in the most solemn festival of Easter. Within the cycle of a year, moreover, she unfolds the whole mystery of Christ, from the incarnation and birth until the ascension, the day of Pentecost, and the expectation of blessed hope and of the coming of the Lord.

Recalling thus the mysteries of redemption, the Church opens to the faithful the riches of her Lord's powers and merits, so that these are in some way made present for all time , and the faithful are enabled to lay hold upon them and become filled with saving grace. 204

Clearly those gathered in Rome thought it important to highlight the cyclical work

of the Church, those repetitive liturgical seasons and holy days through which

“unfolds the whole mystery of Christ” and which, at their core, serve to unite the

203 van Beeck, Catholic Identity , 65-66. NB: the author is also weaving in quotes here from the Catechism of the Catholic Church , #1074. 204 S acrosanctum Concilium (Vatican City, December 4, 1963), #102. Emphasis added.  

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Body. What is perhaps less clear is what is meant by the phrase “keep memory of

the Lord’s resurrection” and how the faithful accomplish that through “recalling.”

How does the Body go about recalling in liturgical worship? And can a common

recalling serve to unite a bifurcated Body?

A study of the role of how memory functions in the life of a Christian seems

increasingly necessary these days. On May 3, 2017, the Washington Post published

a blistering op-ed by the conservative commentator George F. Will entitled,

“Trump Has a Dangerous Disability.” Will ripped the President’s inability to 205

“think and speak clearly,” pointing to Trump’s comments which implied that the

President had only recently discovered who Frederick Douglass was, and seemingly

had no idea that Andrew Jackson – his predecessor and unlikely hero – had died

some sixteen years before the Civil War started. (Trump’s objectionable remarks

on the latter intimated that Jackson could have ‘cut a deal’ to avert what William

Seward called the “irrepressible conflict” that engulfed the nation in the

mid-nineteenth century.) In Will’s estimation, “the problem isn’t that [Trump, a

Christian] does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not

know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is

to know something…He lacks what T.S. Eliot called a sense ‘not only of the

pastness of the past, but of its presence.’”

The President is not alone. In his seminal work, Anamnesis as Dangerous

Memory , Bruce Morrill relates his study of the work of Johann Baptist Metz, the

205 George F. Will, “Trump Has a Dangerous Disability” http://wapo.st/2qOGoEu , May 3, 2017.  

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German scholar of political theology. Metz, he writes, tells of a “pervasive

forgetfulness in society…[that] people’s capacities for remembering (in all the

senses) are deteriorating, and the results are proving humanly catastrophic… [as]

the means for producing short-term results (i.e., "science" or profit) become ends

in themselves.” With no long-term vision and no sense of the arc from which we 206

have come, humanity is quickly - and literally - becoming desensitized, with few

able to truly know ‘not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’

The catastrophe Metz writes about has implications for all aspects of

society, of course, but his writings stress the point that faith communities who fail

to remember well, who do not exercise, expand, and dig deep into their corporate

memory will fracture, shrivel up, and are at risk of living ethically questionable

lives unconcerned about others, thus breaking down community and the

communal identity that their purported faith seeks to build up and ingrain. Still

others have commented on “the condition of so many Christians as having spiritual

amnesia” and that Christians of Western countries and cultures “are suffering a 207

peculiar weakness of concentration” in this area. And Chauvet argues that 208

stressing any one side of his tripartite structure of Scripture, sacrament, and ethics

is a short-sighted approach, akin to forgetting the basics. Indeed, in many ways

206 Bruce T. Morrill, Anamnesis As Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue (Collegeville, Minn: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 148.  207 Peter Atkins, Memory and Liturgy: The Place of Memory in the Composition and Practice of Liturgy ( Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 48.  208 Wendelin Koster “Recovering Collective Memory in the Context of Postmodernism” in Liturgy in a Postmodern World, ed. Keith Pecklers (London: Continuum, 2003), 34.  

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and in many places Christians have failed to ‘keep memory.’ Perhaps they just do

not know how to do it.

3.3 Memory as a Chauvetian Language: Anamnesis

I want to propose here that how Christians exercise their memory, what we

call anamnesis, is a sort of common language in the broadest Chauvetian sense.

There is a corporate quality to Christian anamnesis as language that needs more

attention (and development) in the life of the Church, which I will work to unpack

here.

There are several qualities to human memory that adhere to Chauvet’s

theology that support this proposal. First, memory is corporeal, as it is

experienced in a real body and a real mind, experienced in real time with real

language and in the context of real culture. As such, memory in the body speaks .

And it speaks a language that seeks integration that results from recognition .

Second, since God has fashioned humans with the capacity for memory, God has in

some ways appropriated our memories to mediate himself. Indeed, God is always

and everywhere seeking to make God’s self known. Remembering, then, is the

work we Christians do, both individually and corporately.

Each time we gather for liturgy, to celebrate, “the Church remembers, it

re-appropriates its identity. Anamnesis is remembering: who we are (the Church,

the body of Christ), particularly through our actions (those of liturgy and mission),

our words (credal [sic] and sacramental), and our naming (we are Christian).” 209

209 Anne C. McGuire, “Holy Week and the Paschal Mystery” Liturgical Ministry 13 (Summer 2004), 119.  

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But mere memorial is not enough, at least not for Christians who gather. Instead,

there is a special quality to the Christian’s memory. Indeed, the Christian

community does not simply realize, remember, or recall, but actualizes memory

together through ritual, discovering something new for that day and time, even if

the words, actions and movement have been repeated for generations. 210

To many outsiders, the Church seems obsessed with tradition, and

“immersed in anachronism.” Perhaps this includes many inside the Church, as 211

well. But “it is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” Lewis Carroll 212

cleverly wrote. Indeed, Christian worship is not static, but rather dynamic,

constantly with our eyes on the future - our eschatological end - and always

keeping in mind from whence we have come. To remember, therefore, is to keep

alive this very dynamic even as remembrance is often expressed in various ways: “as

celebration, proclamation, encounter, transformation; for remembrance is never a

merely passive or neutral mental process.” 213

210 I am reminded here of a repeated line of dialogue in the 2014 film The Imitation Game : “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” This line is repeated three separate times in the course of the film: first given to Alan Turing by a classmate to comfort him as he is being bullied. Ten years later, Alan in turn repeats it to his colleague Joan Clarke to encourage her in the face of gender discrimination. Finally, at the end of the film, a further ten years on, Joan gives the line back again to Alan, who is in a deep depression. These words, separated by decades, are actualized in three different circumstances and times, and yet not one syllable of them is changed. The words are given and received over and over, passed back and forth not wholly unlike Holy Communion, yet each time there is something new, which is also intimately and mysteriously tied up in the past. This is the idea behind anamnesis in the Christian tradition.  211 Richard Ginn, The Present and the Past: A Study of Anamnesis (Allison Park, Pa: Pickwick Publications, 1989), 71.  212 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Philadelphia: Altemus, 1899), 98.  213 Philip J. Goddard, Festa Paschalia: A History of the Holy Week Liturgy in the Roman Rite (Gracewing, 2011), 137.  

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These various ways of expressing how we remember point to the fact that

while remembrance is the quintessential quality of Christian worship it is not

without its vagaries. It is seldom simple, but “remembrance is not too small a

thing to admit of precise description; rather it can be inferred from the New

Testament that remembrance is too large and flexible an aspect of the Christian

faith to be defined.” In the act of remembering, memory “acts like a magnet that 214

attracts to itself an odd assortment of associations that enrich it with many layers

of meaning.” So while some assumptions can be made, anamnetic memory in 215

worship is - at its heart - a mystery, and will defy any sort of rigid classification.

Still, mystery ought not be impenetrable, and so we press on to discovery, next

looking at ways of speaking the language of memory in the Easter Vigil service of

the Roman Rite, what Saint Augustine called “the mother, as it were, of all holy

vigils.” It is my contention that the Vigil, the “most characteristic and central 216

liturgical service” of Christian worship and "for a long time the only feast 217

celebrated by Christians,” brings together many ways of Christian 218

memory-making/anamnesis . As the high-water mark for the liturgical practice of

the faith, it can serve as an exemplar for how individual and collective memory can

work in other liturgical gatherings in the Church’s tradition, and that this example

214 Ginn, The Present and the Past, 76.  215 Philip H. Pfatteicher, Liturgical Spirituality ( Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1997) , 82.  216 Augustine. Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons: Fathers of the Church, a New Translation, V. 38. ed. Mary Sarah Muldowney (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc, 1959), Sermon 219, 171.  217 Pfatteicher, Liturgical Spirituality, 71.  218 Aimé Georges Martimort, The Church at Prayer: An Introduction to the Liturgy. Vol 4: The Liturgy and Time (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 1992), 5.  

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might help communities recover from ‘spiritual amnesia’ and arrive at a common

core identity that unifies the people through their mutual recognition.

3.4 ‘Speaking the Corporeal Language’ of Memory in the Easter Vigil

I have chosen to look at the Easter Vigil because, in some ways, this ritual is

the ultimate example of ‘symbolic rupture,’ to use Chauvet’s terminology, as it

forces us to encounter God and God’s actions writ large without any hope of

mastering God.

Indeed, “this is the night”, the Exsultet repeatedly and joyously claims at 219

the outset, when “God delivers the children of Israel, when Christ rises from the

tomb, when heaven and earth are joined. All the events of sacred history become

contemporary with us and we with them as separation in chronological time is

overcome.” In this service of symbolic rupture, this high-water mark and 220

‘moment of eternity’ in which the faithful come to know God as the wholly Other

who breaks down all preconceived categories through the defeat of death itself, the

Christian at worship can participate in three distinct ways of speaking the language

of memory, here associated with three aspects of the liturgical celebration:

1. ‘Holding Memory’ in the expansive Liturgy of the Word.

2. ‘Sharing Memory’ in the public Rites of Initiation.

3. ‘Futuring Memory’ in the summit of the Eucharistic anaphora.

Let us take each of these ways in turn.

219 The Third Edition of the Roman Missal ( Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 2012), #19, 347-363.  220 Pfatteicher, Liturgical Spirituality, 79- 80.  

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3.4.1 ‘Holding Memory’ in the expansive Liturgy of the Word

Following the lighting of the new fire and the singing of the Exsultet , the

community that has gathered to hold vigil sits in darkness “and listens to the great

deeds which God did for their fathers.” This is the next moment of the Vigil 221

liturgy in which the people gathered enter into communion with God, “by

discovering God’s presence in memory. This is the lesson of the scriptures.” For 222

the most part a sequential telling of historical events, the scriptures used in this

expansive Liturgy of the Word (seven Old Testament readings are included in the

current Missal, in addition to an epistle and a Gospel narrative) are not simply 223

read, but proclaimed, with each followed by a thematic collect that calls to mind

the story just revealed. In this model, the events related become “the story of

humanity’s encounter with God.” 224

The Liturgy of the Word at the Easter Vigil is thus the example par

excellence wherein the Christian remembers that it is God who so often has taken

the initiative with us. In other words, in the scriptures we hear, we have the

opportunity to remember that throughout history, and right to the present day,

God has remembered us . If the basis of our worship is the relationship between us

and God, then it is precisely this give and take, this two-way exercise of memory

that is further developed and deepened when we gather for liturgy. (This ‘give and

221 Rupert Berger, “Content and Form of the Easter Vigil" in Celebrating the Easter Vigil, Matthew J. O’Connell, et al. ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 39.  222 Jerome Hall and Edward J. Kilmartin. We Have the Mind of Christ: The Holy Spirit and Liturgical Memory in the Thought of Edward J. Kilmartin ( Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 2001), 114.  223 The Third Edition of the Roman Missal , #20, 364.  224 Judith Marie Kubicki, T he Presence of Christ in the Gathered Assembly (London: Continuum, 2006), 93.  

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take’ is the basis for what Chauvet means when he uses the phrase ‘symbolic

exchange:’ having received a gratuitous gift from God [i.e. grace], one must then in

turn give it away to others.) The Easter Vigil’s Liturgy of the Word, in its expansive

form, is an aid in helping us, then, to remember and hold onto the God who has

first remembered us - not just me or my preferred crowd - for we “come to know

God, not only from our own experiences, but also from the corporate experiences

of our ancestors in the faith.” (It can be noted here, too, that the individual 225

collects that following each reading are our speaking back in thanks and praise,

further ritualizing the give and take.)

In his study of Holy Week, Phillip Goddard highlights the readings that have

been used historically and that can be found in eleven lectionaries of the tradition

celebrated in various localities from the 4th to the 20th century (e.g. Gregorian;

Old Gelasian; Gallican; Mozarabic, etc.). Without the space or inclination to delve

into a full comparison of these texts, it is enough to point out here that in the

lectionaries Goddard presents, two scripture readings are found across all: Genesis

1, (the so-called ‘first’ Creation narrative) and Exodus 14-15 (the crossing of the Red

Sea and the subsequent movement of the Israelites into the wilderness). It is 226

perhaps clear, then, that we ought consider these two narratives as foundational

texts and themes to our relationship with God, and thus our common identity as

Christian people: God creates a world for us, and God liberates us from the bonds

of slavery that have come to define too much of that world. Throughout time and

225 Atkins, Memory and Liturgy, 30.  226 Goddard, Festa Paschalia, 248.  

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space, these two memorable ‘lessons’ have come to mean perhaps different things

as the context of each successive generation has changed, but the fundamental

reality they signify remains constant: God does not forget God’s covenantal people,

chosen and provided for, from the beginning of time. This is who we are.

In any Liturgy of the Word, “we do not simply review what God has done in

the past. As the ritual erases the separation of time and space, what is described in

the readings becomes contemporary, and a personal experience.” The sacred 227

texts that we hear proclaimed at the Easter Vigil, from the story of Creation to the

glory of the Resurrection of Christ, tell “the story of the personal relationship

which God initiated with God’s people. It is a moving love story - a love,

threatened by the infidelity of one of the partners and saved by the fidelity of the

other, - faithful until death.” This is not a quaint history we hear, disconnected 228

from us, but rather a living tradition, one that lives inside of us, and that we can

hold, tenderly and surely, by re-remembering the God who remembers us. Our

common humanity is proclaimed to us, held up as a mirror, almost, in which we

see ourselves, and we cannot help but see one another in the reflection.

It should be noted here that too often the Liturgy of the Word at the Easter

Vigil is “treated like a stepmother; in the consciousness of priests and communities

it is often obscured by the glow of the Exsultet and the splendor of baptism and the

Eucharist.” Many, for dubious ‘pastoral reasons’, simply excise many of the 229

readings. But if the Scripture section of Chauvet’s tripartite structure of symbolic

227 Pfatteicher, Liturgical Spirituality, 94.  228 Koster, “Recovering Collective Memory”, 33.  229 Berger, “Content and Form of the Easter Vigil”, 39.  

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exchange leads to cognition, i.e. understanding of who and whose we are, this is a

short-sighted choice. Indeed, without the opportunity to first hold well the

foundational, common memory revealed in this lengthy section of the Vigil, it will

be impossible to move into the next way to speak the language of memory: by

sharing it.

3.4.2 ‘Sharing Memory’ in the Public Rites of Initiation

Following the Liturgy of the Word, the Easter Vigil moves into a celebration

of the Baptismal Liturgy and Rites of Initiation, bringing into the community 230

those catechumens and elect who have been prepared for the sacraments of

baptism, confirmation, and first communion. In a unique way, “the Easter Vigil

compresses the whole of the ancient baptismal preparation into one night. As the

lessons are read [i.e. the Scriptures], the congregation again becomes catechumens

listening, learning, being shaped in mind and heart, encouraged to probe motives,

to test commitment, to increase understanding, to change their lives.” This is key 231

to this way of speaking the language of memory: the context of sharing is the

community itself.

What ought go without saying is that all Christian liturgical celebration

helps “worshipers discover themselves as members of a community who receive the

meaning of their lives from the Father's love.” There is no such thing as a solitary 232

Christian; rather, when gathered as a community in liturgy, each person, as

celebrant, “support[s] one another in a faithfulness that can be lived through the

230 The Third Edition of the Roman Missal , #37-58, 369-384.  231 Pfatteicher, Liturgical Spirituality, 92.  232 Hall, We Have the Mind of Christ, 110.  

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whole of their lives.” Indeed, we “can only know who we are if we remember to 233

whom we are related:” first to the God “who won’t let go” (as revealed in an 234 235

expansive way in the Liturgy of Word previously discussed) and to the very persons

with whom we stand shoulder to shoulder. We remember in the celebration of

these rites of initiation the relatedness we share with one another as beloved

children, remembered by God.

The rites of initiation celebrated at the Easter Vigil serve therefore to widen

the circle of people with whom we stand. These newest members of the

community are gathered into the language-of-memory fold through baptism, and

in their reception new memories are thus created and then added, helping to form

the community’s collective memory. The ‘old’ members of the community, those

whose baptisms were celebrated perhaps decades ago, renew their baptismal

promises, sharing with the newly baptized their memory of and belief in the God 236

who first “remembers us as those known by name and claimed as part of God's own

people, called to honour [sic] and serve the divine will and purpose.” (This 237

renewal of baptismal promises, though included in the Rite of Baptism celebrated

throughout the year, is in that rite reserved for the parents and godparents, for

reasons surpassing understanding. ) It is only during the Easter Vigil that the 238

233 Ibid.  234 Atkins, Memory and Liturgy , xii.  235 Piet van Breemen, The God Who Won't Let Go (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2001), title page.  236 The Third Edition of the Roman Missal , #55, 382-383.  237 Atkins, Memory and Liturgy , 53.  238 The Order of Baptism of Children: English Translation According to the Second Typical Edition, for Use in the Dioceses of the United States of America (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2020, #59-60, 29-30.  

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community as a whole has the opportunity to be in touch with the memory of their

own baptism through this renewal (though a pastoral minister worth his or her salt

would include the gathered assembly in the profession of faith and, therefore, of

memory.)

What is clear here is that “without opportunities to be in touch with the fact

of our baptism, the memory of who we are [as Christians gathered] will fade away,

only to be recalled in some crisis or in a fresh experience of the grace of God. Our

memories need ongoing prompting for us to hold fast to the actions of God on our

behalf.” Being a witness to, and an active participant in, this welcoming rite of 239

the Church at the Easter Vigil is one of the foundational ways in which this is

accomplished and Christian memory (and therefore identity) is driven forward: the

‘promises remembered’ in the Liturgy of the Word (i.e. the reason for our hope),

are now transformed into an active ‘promise to remember’, (i.e. our hope must be

shared). This movement propels us to the next way to speak the language of

memory, wherein we remember with longing a future full of hope in the gift of the

Eucharist.

3.4.3 ‘Futuring Memory’ in the summit of the Eucharistic anaphora

Perhaps it would be good to state plainly and simply the Christian notion of

time here: in short, past, present, and future are melded together in the process of

anamnesis . Thus we can speak the language of memory even as it concerns the

future: our eschatological end as accomplished through the sacrificial self-gift of

239 Atkins, Memory and Liturgy , 52.  

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God in Christ. Eucharistic anamnesis is perhaps the most familiar understanding

of memory-making to the reader. Still, an overview, and a word about its unique

character during the Easter Vigil, are worth spending some time on here.

Morrill is helpful here, providing a broad overview:

When Christians perform remembrances of Jesus they do so with the desire of knowing Christ more deeply and thereby being empowered to imitate him in word and deed. In the case of the Eucharistic Prayer, the remembrance of Jesus leads into the petition for the Holy Spirit to sanctify both the gifts and the community [the epiclesis]. This, in turn, elicits further intercessions for the salvation of various members of the Church and, ultimately, the whole world. Thus, within the offering of the anaphora itself the community undertakes its vocation of service to the world in the image of Christ; it intercedes for the living and the dead and concludes by raising all up to God in doxological acclamation [, Through Him, with Him, in Him… ]. 240

In giving thanks and praise, we recall and remind God what God has done in the

rich Preface prayers to which we can only respond in jubilant admiration – Holy,

Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts! Heaven and earth are full of thy glory! Hosanna in

the highest! In this prayer and the response – this ritual moment – we remember

that we are bound to God, and that God is bound to us, and as we repeat these

words and actions over and over, week after week, we are formed and oriented -

consecrated, even - into the living Eucharist ourselves. God’s saving action

happened once, for all, and for all time. But “the reality it initiates and signifies,

however, is neither past nor contingent, but ever-present in God, and through faith

to us, at every moment of our lives.” 241

240 Morrill, Anamnesis As Dangerous Memory, 206.  241 Robert Taft, “The Liturgical Year: Studies, Prospects, Reflections”, in Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year , Maxwell E. Johnson, ed. (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 2000), 13.  

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Additionally, the epiclesis - the invocation of the Holy Spirit - is a memorial

event in and of itself, for it serves to confirm what God has already done and is

doing: making all things holy in God’s self, not least of all through the saving

action of the Son, for this is the source of our hope and the reason for our praise in

any liturgy. Christ and his salvific act must be actively applied to the present, every

second of every day so that the mystery of Christ’s life becomes the mystery of our

own lives. Here we can see the third part of Chauvet’s structure: namely that the

movement to ethics in the tripod implies action. For if we are formed into the

living Eucharist ourselves, then we are being called upon to be Christ in the world,

to act as Christ himself acted. As the eminent Jesuit liturgical theologian Robert

Taft writes, “this is what we do in liturgy. We make anamnesis, memorial, of this

dynamic saving power in our lives, to make it penetrate ever more into the depths

of our being, for the building up of the Body of Christ.” 242

In the Liturgy of the Eucharist at the Easter Vigil, therefore, the gathered

community remembers into the future, and the fullness of this way of speaking the

language of memory is based on what has directly preceded it in the ritual: having

remembered that the God who creates and engages us (heard and experienced in

the expansive Liturgy of the Word, i.e. ‘holding memory’) in our relatedness (seen

vividly in the celebration of the Rites of Initiation, i.e. ‘sharing memory’), the

gathered community is now invited into a moment of eschatological fulfillment,

what I am calling ‘futuring memory.’ It is only with trust in the Savior’s sacrificial

242 Ibid, 18.  

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and efficacious self-offering (especially highlighted at the Vigil service on the night

of his Resurrection and defeat of death) that we are able to place our future hope

on the eucharistic table alongside the elements of bread and wine and can take

seriously the invitation of the presider, in the name of Christ: ‘Take this all of you’,

where ‘all’ necessarily includes one’s past, present, and future and that of our

neighbors standing beside us in the pew, united in our common language of

memory. Our future is part of what we offer to God and to one another, even as we

can trust wholly in the promise of God and our neighbor.

Here is the source and summit of our faith, and to which all our language of

memory is building: hope and trust for a tomorrow we can taste even today

because of the memory of a yesterday spent in the care of a God who

continually creates and saves. “We recall the presence of Christ for this moment

of time, while also recognizing that Jesus is part of history and that his presence

now foreshadows the coming again of Christ in future glory.” This is the 243

eschatological fullness of the sacrament: a shared expectation and hope that

should serve to unite us so that we may have a little taste of heaven here on earth

and one’s understanding of this mystery - though practiced even daily by some - is

perhaps best understood and revealed only at the Easter Vigil, where the many

ways of speaking the language of memory are on display and activated, helping us

to recognize, give thanks, and act within our common identity. ‘This is the night;’

indeed, this is our night.

243 Atkins, Memory and Liturgy , xi.  

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The ‘promises remembered’ in the Liturgy of the Word (i.e. the reason for

our hope and our locus of recognition), which were transformed into an active

‘promise to remember’ in the Rites of Initiation (i.e. our hope must be shared, and

for this we must give thanks), are now ‘remembered promises’ to be lived out in

this world and in the next through the gift of the Eucharist and the gift of faith (i.e.

our hope, which is assured, must be part of the ethical offering of our lives, even

daily, to God and to one another.) The divine command, ‘Do this in memory of

me’, “was at once the igniting spark of the memory power of the Church, and also

its content.” At the conclusion of the vigil, having taken the opportunity to 244

speak well the language of memory, even into the future, the gathered community

disperses once more, sent back into the dark to be the Body of Christ in the world,

to be disciples ‘in his memory,’ and to live into the reality of Christ’s dream: ‘that all

might be one.’

244 Koster, “Recovering Collective Memory”, 33.  

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Conclusion: The Paschal Candle: Indictment or Celebration?

By way of concluding remarks, I want to circle back to the story with which

I began this thesis: the student carrying the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil who

rolled his eyes at the mention of Pope St. John XXIII. I was so disheartened then

by his action, which brought to light this thesis and my own understanding of the

disunity that plagues us. But when I step back and look again upon that scene, I

try not to focus in on the rolling of the eyes, but rather the Paschal Candle which

he held. You see, the Paschal Candle, “treated ritually as if it were Christ” in the 245

Easter Vigil service, “almost indistinguishable from what it represents, Jesus Christ”

should serve as a tangible reminder of the high-water mark of anamnesis 246

accomplished at the Vigil, a symbol for the united community of the many ways of

speaking memory outlined above that are engaged in the ritual. The candle’s

prominent place in the sanctuary during the Easter Season, and its ubiquitous 247

presence for other sacramental moments of importance in the life of the gathered

assembly (such as weddings, baptisms, and funerals), further speaks to its symbolic

value. However, it can also serve as a tangible indictment of a community that

suffers from spiritual amnesia, and that has forgotten who they are and whose they

are. Indeed, it can be an indictment of a community that has forgotten how to

speak the language of memory.

245 Pfatteicher, Liturgical Spirituality, 85.  246 Ibid., 86.  247 The Third Edition of the Roman Missal , #70, 386.  

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If a Christian community is not united, but rather bifurcated, it could be

said to be ineffectively preaching the coming kingdom of Christ. It could be a

community of modern-day Corinthians, of which Paul could rightly charge, “It is

not the Lord’s Supper you eat.” Indeed, we know these communities exist, where 248

the “[l]iturgical memorial of Christ’s saving deeds might be sincerely but wrongly

celebrated,” where the community has been divided into neat, manageable, 249

homophilic parts instead of gathered as the mess we are, and led into speaking the

language of common and corporeal memory.

Yet all need not be lost. What I have hoped to show in this paper is that the

ways of speaking memory available to us in the Great Vigil of Easter are exemplars

for what we ought strive for in our every day liturgies; indeed, in our everyday lives.

Speaking the language of memory in the Christian tradition is a year-round

communal process and invitation, which cannot be reserved for the Easter Vigil

alone, or just on Sundays, or solely for individuals. Rather, the Vigil “is the model

for everything else we do in worship. It is, to put it quite simply, the service. It is a

concentration in one service of what Christian worship does throughout the year.”

Or, at least, it should be. But “if a congregation fails to look beyond itself, then 250

the process of remembrance is stifled. The central act of worship of the majority of

denominations has at its center the anamnesis clause, with its implication ‘Live as I

248 1 Corinthians 11:20  249 Hall, We Have the Mind of Christ, 111.  250 Pfatteicher, Liturgical Spirituality, 104.  

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have lived.’ If a congregation is inward-looking rather than outward-looking, it is

impossible to live as Jesus Christ lived.” 251

Still, “if the corporate memory is not constantly applied and adapted to the

new context, the society can be frozen in the past.” This would be to settle for 252

nostalgia, which “does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it

idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection.” But the 253

language of memory as I have described it above is different. “Memory too may

idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and

comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with

good cheer. It sees past, present, and future as continuous.” We are invited to 254

participate in memorial acts by holding, sharing, and ‘futuring' our memories, not

just once a year, or even once a week, but always, and with all people.

If the community can do this, then the Paschal Candle, that rich symbol

from the Easter Vigil and a potent reminder of the power of remembrance, need

not be an indictment, but can serve instead as a ‘really-real’ symbol of a united

community that is not afraid of the future, but is filled with hope as, together, they

walk into it.

At the end of this thesis, however, I should also acknowledge that the Easter

Vigil cannot be expected to solve all the problems that exist in a bifurcated parish.

Indeed, the liturgy is not the only way (for some maybe not even the primary way)

251 Ginn, The Present and the Past , 85.  252 Atkins, Memory and Liturgy, 76.  253 Ibid.  254 Ibid.  

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that a person might interact with their parish community and their fellow

parishioners. Still, perhaps it is enough to say that if the Easter Vigil is the liturgy

par excellence , as has been stated, then it surely has something to teach us about

how we might be together in all other areas in the life of a community. Indeed,

what we do at the Vigil - speaking the language of memory - could serve as a sort

of pastoral plan for all aspects of a community's life, and could be usefully applied

to all of a parish's ministries. I am reminded of the late Bishop Ken Untener of

Saginaw, Michigan who decreed in 1991 that all meetings in the diocese - at the

parish or diocesan level, no matter what their purpose - had to begin with the

following agenda item: How shall what we are doing here affect or involve the

poor? 255

A similar challenge could be posed to parishes then, utilizing the tri-partite

structure I have outlined: How does this ministry - the RCIA, the parish chapter of

St. Vincent de Paul, the religious education program for children, etc. - help us to

hold the memory of who we are? How does a particular ministry, or a particular

plan of action within a ministry, help us to share the memory of whose we are,

together? And how do ministries in particular and as a whole contribute to a

shared futuring of memory , where we are living together always with our eyes on

the promised tomorrow?

This is, perhaps, a bit esoteric, but it could be enough for a parish council or

a pastor to hold onto and to develop a pastoral plan always with this basic question

255 Untener mused on his diocesan challenge in a piece entitled “How Should We Think About the Poor? A Bishop Reflects”, Catholic Update , July 1, 1992.

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in mind: How is the parish ‘speaking the language of memory’ together, not just on

the one night of the Easter Vigil, but in and out, every day? If Eucharist is the

'source and summit,' and the Easter Vigil is the liturgy par excellence , then what we

celebrate on that holy night necessarily flows down into the rest of our experience,

even daily. What it requires, though, is some intentionality on our part, that we

wrestle with what the liturgy does, and what it draws out of us.

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